the showman, still the spectator,’ until we become almost tired of the song.  ’Here some noble act was achieved—­there some valiant man perished.’  Every nook and corner of the place tells the same story; until we are tempted to enquire ’What are we doing (or are fit and capable of doing personally, on an emergency, in the matter of fighting,) to compare with the achievements of these Norman men of all ranks of life?’

But not only in Normandy, it is the same wherever we go:  as far as our own personal part in heroic actions is concerned, we live in an atmosphere of unreality; we read of great deeds rather than achieve them, we make shows of the works of our ancestors, we take pence (readily) over the graves of our kinsmen, and live, as it seems to us, rather unworthily, in the past.

With our nineteenth-century inventions, we could, it is true, mow down these castle heights in half an hour, and we might well be proud of the achievement as a nation; but our warfare is at best but poor mercenary work, the heart of the nation—­the life and courage of its people—­are not in it.[40] We civilians, are too much protected, and most of us do not know how to fight.  Like the Athenians, we are supposed to be cultivating the arts of peace, but, as we endeavoured to show at Caen, if judged by our monuments, we are making no great mark in our generation.  Perhaps this is a question rather wide of our subject, but let us at least contend for one thing, viz.:—­that if the mission of the present generation is not to wield battle-axes, but rather to fight social battles, say for the amelioration of the unhappy part of the population; and if it is our fortune to be protected the while, by a staff of policemen, and by strong laws against crime—­that we should not neglect, at the same time, to cultivate and preserve the personal valour that is in us, by the use of arms.  It may be that the day is shortly coming (our engineers predict that we shall soon have hand-to-hand fighting again), when every individual amongst us will have to put his courage to the proof; and if this should ever happen, it will certainly not diminish our interest in the construction and arrangement of these mediaeval castles, or in the battles that have been fought beneath their walls.

CHAPTER IX.

ROUEN.

At a corner of the market-place at Rouen, there stood, but a few years ago, one of the most picturesque houses in all Normandy, and with a story (if we are to believe the old chroniclers) as pathetic as any in history.

It was from a door in this house that, in the year 1431, the unfortunate Joan of Arc was led out to be ‘burned as a sorceress’ before the people of Rouen.  We need not dwell upon the story of the ’fair maid of Orleans,’ which every child has by heart, but (mindful of our picturesque mission) we should like to carry the reader in imagination to the same spot just four hundred years later, when