. La Côte d'Émeraude. vince in all their notionsa sense of failure and disinheritance. We pass fromthem to a people who have been conquerors in everyland for which they left their rude and straitenednorthern home; who, wherever they have come,have made themselves overlords, and yet have so knownhow to lighten the mailed fist, and to exercise themagnetism of a noble and chivalrous nature, that thepeoples they ruled have gloried in their masters. TheEnglishman is affectionately loyal to sovereigns whocommence their line from the Norman conqueror,and ignore the English Kings who preceded him ; he
. La Côte d'Émeraude. vince in all their notionsa sense of failure and disinheritance. We pass fromthem to a people who have been conquerors in everyland for which they left their rude and straitenednorthern home; who, wherever they have come,have made themselves overlords, and yet have so knownhow to lighten the mailed fist, and to exercise themagnetism of a noble and chivalrous nature, that thepeoples they ruled have gloried in their masters. TheEnglishman is affectionately loyal to sovereigns whocommence their line from the Norman conqueror,and ignore the English Kings who preceded him ; heis conscious of no slur in that, as a result of theconquest, he speaks a hybrid and pollarded tongue inwhich all that denotes honour, rule, and dominion—with the notable exception of the two highest titlesof all—is expressed in the alien element; he has nosense of grievance in that the polity imposed on himby the conquest is as anomalous as his language, andits history for centuries that of a slow, painful and 148. i * • .*-.» mt GENDARMERIE, TOUR GABRIEL, AND RIVER COESNON,MONT ST. MICHEL Pontorson imperfect conquering back of its native character. TheSicilian, who is as alien to and unlike the Norman asany European, yet looks back to the two hundred yearsof Norman governance as to the golden age in hisislands history, and with droll indifference to patentfacts, claims the Norman as the most honoured of hismany ancestors. Of course there was not this racial cleavage betweenthe English and their Norman conquerors, who were,in fact, identical with the Danes to whom the Peace ofWedmore had given half the land, and who hadalready become good Englishmen; but in the historyof England it is the Latin civilization of the Normans,not their Teutonic kinship, that counts. In Normandy,on the other hand, it is kinship rather than contrastthat strikes us ; the appearance, the bearing, thecharacter of the people are almost more Englishthan French. The Norman—as I think the mostunc
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