Taine on the Saxons

I have no time to read anything at the moment, but I happened to pick up our library’s old beaten 1900 edition (some of the pages are still uncut) of Hippolyte Taine’s History of English Literature, and have found it hard to put down.

Especially entertaining are his blunt moments, such as the following remark about Norman-Saxon relations in England:

“In a century and a half [the Normans] were so far cultivated as to find the Saxons ‘unlettered and rude.’ That was the excuse they made for banishing them from the abbeys and all valuable ecclesiastical offices. And, in fact, this excuse was rational, for they instinctively hated gross stupidity.”