East Anglian meres. No one could (or does) understand modern England who
does not see its sub-units to have become by now the great industrial
towns, or who fails to seize the spirit of each group of such
towns--with London lying isolated in the south, a negative to the rest.

France is built of such sub-units: it is the peculiarity of French
development that these are not small territories mainly of an average
extent with government answerable in a long day's ride to one centre,
such as most English counties are; nor city States such as form the
piles upon which the structure of Italy has been raised; nor kingdoms
such as coalesced to reform the Spanish people; but _provinces_,
differing greatly in area, from little plains enclosed, like the
Rousillon, to great stretches of landscape succeeding landscape like the
Bourbonnais or the Perigord.

The real continuity with an immemorial past which inspires all Gallic
things is discoverable in this arrangement of Gaul. At the first glance
one might imagine a French province to be a chance growth of the feudal
ties and of the Middle Ages. A further effort of scholarship will prove
it essentially Roman. An intimate acquaintance with its customs and with
the site of its strongholds, coupled with a comparison of the most
recent and most fruitful hypotheses of historians, will convince you
that it is earlier than the Roman conquest; it is tribal, or the home of
a group of cognate tribes, and its roots are lost in prehistory. So it
is with Normandy.

This vast territory--larger (I think) than all North England from the
Humber to Cheviot and from Chester to the Solway--has never formed a
nation. It is typical of the national idea in France that Normandy
should have "held" of the political centre of the country, probably