from a very early date, and that after the Conquest their family arms were spread over England; but not in any measure to the extent to which they are used amongst us.  In these days nearly every one has a ‘crest’ or a ‘coat of arms.’[13] Do the officials of Heralds’ College (we may ask in parenthesis) believe in their craft? and does the tax collector ever receive 13_s_. 4_d_. for imaginary honours?  Such things did not, and could not, exist in mediaeval times, in the days when every one had his place from the noble to the vassal, when every man’s name was known and his title to property, if he had any, clearly defined.  A ‘title’ in those days meant a title to land, and an acceptance of its responsibilities.  How many “titled” people in these days possess the one, or accept the other?

It would seem reserved for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to create a state of society when the question ‘Who is he?’ has to be perpetually asked and not always easily answered; in a word, to foster and increase to its present almost overwhelming dimensions a great middle-class of society without a name or a title, or even a home to call its own.

It was assuredly a good time when men’s lives and actions were handed down, so to speak, from father to son, and the poor man had his ’locum tenens’ as well as the rich; and how he loved his own dwelling, how he decked it with ornament according to his taste or his means, how he watched over it and preserved it from decay; how, in short, his pride was in his own hearth and home—­these old buildings tell us.

The conservative influence of all this on his character (which, although we are in France, we must call ’home-feeling’), its tendency to contentment and self-respect, are subjects suggestive enough, but on which we must not dwell.  It flourished during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and it declined when men commenced crowding into cities, and were no longer ’content to do without what they could not produce.’[14]

Let us stay quietly at Lisieux, if we have time, and see the place, for we shall find nothing in all Normandy to exceed it in interest; and the way to see it best, and to remember it, is, undoubtedly, to sketch.  Let us make out all these curious ‘bits,’ these signs, and emblems in wood and stone—­twigs and moss, and birds with delicate wings, a spray of leaves, the serene head of a Madonna, the rampant heraldic griffin,—­let us copy, if we can, their colour and the marks of age.  We may sketch them, and we may dwell upon them, here, with the enthusiasm of an artist who returns to his favourite picture again and again; for we have seen the sun scorching these panels and burning upon their gilded shields; and we have seen the snow-flakes fall upon these sculptured eaves, silently, softly, thickly—­like the dust upon the bronze figures of Ghiberti’s gates at Florence—­so thickly fall, so soon disperse, leaving the dark outlines sharp and clear against the sky; the wood almost as unharmed as the bronze.