broadly, Athens, Rome, and Florence are self-taught, and internally
developed; while all the Gothic races, without any exception, but
especially those of London and Paris, are afterwards taught by these;
and had, therefore, when they chose to accept it, the delight of being
instructed, without trouble or doubt, as fast as they could read or
imitate; and brought forward to the point where their own northern
instincts might wholesomely superimpose or graft some national ideas
upon these sound instructions. Read over what I said on this subject
in the third of my lectures last year (page 79), and simplify that
already brief statement further, by fastening in your mind Carlyle's
general symbol of the best attainments of northern religious
sculpture,--"three whalecubs combined by boiling," and reflecting that
the mental history of all northern European art is the modification
of that graceful type, under the orders of the Athena of Homer and
Phidias.

And this being quite indisputably the broad fact of the matter, I
greatly marvel that your historians never, so far as I have read,
think of proposing to you the question--what you might have made
of yourselves _without_ the help of Homer and Phidias: what sort of
beings the Saxon and the Celt, the Frank and the Dane, might have been
by this time, untouched by the spear of Pallas, unruled by the rod of
Agricola, and sincerely the native growth, pure of root, and ungrafted
in fruit of the clay of Isis, rock of Dovrefeldt, and sands of Elbe?
Think of it, and think chiefly what form the ideas, and images,
of your natural religion might probably have taken, if no Roman
missionary had ever passed the Alps in charity, and no English king in
pilgrimage.

I have been of late indebted more than I can express to the friend who