and more or less therefore chilled and degraded the hearts of the men
thus set to servile, or at best, hireling, labour.

In 1874, I went to see Etna, Scylla, Charybdis, and the tombs of the
Norman Kings at Palermo; surprised, as you may imagine, to find that
there wasn't a stroke nor a notion of Norman work in them. They are,
every atom, done by Greeks, and are as pure Greek as the temple of
Ægina; but more rich and refined. I drew with accurate care, and
with measured profile of every moulding, the tomb built for Roger
II. (afterwards Frederick II. was laid in its dark porphyry). And it
is a perfect type of the Greek-Christian form of tomb--temple over
sarcophagus, in which the pediments rise gradually, as time goes on,
into acute angles--get pierced in the gable with foils, and their
sculptures thrown outside on their flanks, and become at last in the
fourteenth century, the tombs of Verona. But what is the meaning of
the Normans employing these Greek slaves for their work in Sicily
(within thirty miles of the field of Himera)? Well, the main meaning
is that though the Normans could build, they couldn't carve, and were
wise enough not to try to, when they couldn't, as you do now all over
this intensely comic and tragic town: but, here in England, they only
employed the Saxon with a grudge, and therefore being more and more
driven to use barren mouldings without sculpture, gradually developed
the structural forms of archivolt, which breaking into the lancet,
brighten and balance themselves into the symmetry of early English
Gothic.

But even for the first decoration of the archivolt itself, they were
probably indebted to the Greeks in a degree I never apprehended, until
by pure happy chance, a friend gave me the clue to it just as I was
writing the last pages of this lecture.