[55] Homer’s Iliad, xviii. 480-617 (Butcher and Lang).
[56] See “Woltmann and Woermann.” Trans. Sidney Colvin, p. 64.
[57] Except, perhaps, the keystone arch.
[58] Virg. Æneid iii. Trans. G.L.G.
[59] The Indian Cush.
[60] Except in the art of the Celts, whose Indo-Chinese style shows evidence of Mongolian importation, and later we find traces of a similar influence: for instance, “Yarkand rugs are semi-Chinese, semi-Tartar, resembling also the works of India and Persia. It is easy to distinguish from what source each comes, as one perceives the influence of the neighbouring native art” (“On Japan,” by Dresser, p. 322).
[61] See a paper by M. Terrien de la Couperie in the Journal of the Society of Arts, 1881.
[62] “Rome had to be overthrown that the new religion and the new civilization might be established. Christianity did its work in winning to it those Teutonic conquerors, but how vast was the cost to the world, occasioned by the necessity of casting into the boiling cauldron of barbarous warfare, that noble civilization and the treasures which Rome had gathered in the spoil of a conquered universe! Had any old Roman, or Christian father been gifted with Jeremiah’s prescience, he might have seen the fire blazing amidst the forests of Germany, and the cauldron settling down with its mouth turned towards the south, and would have uttered his lamentation in plaintive tones, such as Jeremiah’s, and in the same melancholy key” (“Holy Bible,” with Commentary by Canon Cook, Introduction to Jeremiah, vol. i. p. 319).
[63] Scandinavian art became strongly tinctured with that of Byzantium. The Varangian Guards were, probably, answerable for this, by their intercourse between Greece and their native land, which lasted so many centuries. There have come down to us, as witnesses of this intercourse, many coins and much jewellery, in which all that is Oriental in its style has been leavened by its passage through Byzantine and Romanesque channels. Gibbon, writing of this period, says: “The habits of pilgrimage and piracy had approximated the countries of the earth” (see Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall,” chap. lv.).
Greek embroidered patterns and Greek forms of dress still linger in Iceland. There was lately brought to England a bride’s dress, which might have belonged to the Greek wife of a Varangian guardsman. It is embroidered with a border in gold of the classical honeysuckle pattern; and the bridal wreath of gilt metal flowers might, from its style, be supposed to have been taken from a Greek tomb.