Far back in the history of our race there stands, luminous and large, in his milieu of mediæval mist, a mounted conqueror with sword and torch—the immediate offspring of Scandinavian Jarls—the remote progenitor of the Virginian "Cavalier." It is the founder of that Anglo-Norman civilization of which we form a part, and which, in many ways, still responds to the impulse of that imperial brain.
William the Norman presented in vivid epitome the characteristic traits of his race, with other traits or variations of these traits that made him almost an abnormal figure even in the history of those times. He has been commonly depicted as physically a giant among his fellows; but Lord Lytton (a good authority) discredits these legends of gigantic stature; it is seldom we find, he declares, the association of great size and commanding intellect in great men; it is really a violation of the natural law, though possibly the great Norman may have been, like Abraham Lincoln, an exception to the general rule. His physical forces were certainly subjected to severe tests. His personal leadership in the wintry marches through the North of England were, practically, paralleled in later days by the wintry marches of our Scandinavian general, George Rogers Clark, in the vast territories of the North and West. The prodigious fortitude and endurance manifested in these campaigns proved beyond all question the staying capacity of the Scandinavian blood. The royal Norman had all the tastes of a forest-born man; not a mere taste for the sports of the field as known to the English gentlemen of a later period, but a wild, almost demoniac passion for the atrocities of the chase as practised by the early Norman kings. A love of royal sport does not discredit a modern ruler of men; but scarcely such sport as this. The "wild king," says an old English chronicler, "loves wild beasts as if he were a wild beast himself and the father of wild beasts." Churches and manors were swept away to create forests and dens and retreats for the creatures he loved to slay. He ruled, conquered, hunted, ravaged, "harried," and subjugated from Brittany to Scotland; and yet, says the same old chronicler in his "Flowers of History," "he was such a lover of peace that a girl laden with gold might traverse the whole of England without harm."
HONORABLE WILLIAM PRESTON.
This may or may not be a "flower of history"; but if true, it is a startling historic fact.