The image of the lion came from north to south, only because the idea of the lion had long ago come from south to north.

The Christian had a symbolic lion he had never seen, and the Moslem had a real lion that he refused to draw.
For we could deduce from the case of this single creature the fact that all our civilisation came from the Mediterranean, and the folly of pretending that it came from the North Sea.
Those two heraldic shapes over the gate may be borrowed from the Norman or Angevin shield now quartered in the Royal Arms of England.

They may have been copied, directly or indirectly, from that great Angevin King of England whose title credited him with the heart of a lion.
They may have in some far-off fashion the same ancestry as the boast or jest of our own comic papers when they talk about the British Lion.
But why are there lions, though of French or feudal origin, on the flag of England?
There might as well be camels or crocodiles, for all the apparent connection with England or with France.
Why was an English king described as having the heart of a lion, any more than of a tiger?
Why do your patriotic cartoons threaten the world with the wrath of the British Lion; it is really as strange as if they warned it against stimulating the rage of the British rhinoceros.
Why did not the French and English princes find in the wild boars, that were the objects of their hunting, the subjects of their heraldry?
If the Normans were really the Northmen, the sea-wolves of Scandinavian piracy, why did they not display three wolves on their shields?
Why has not John Bull been content with the English bull, or the English bull-dog?
The answer might be put somewhat defiantly by saying that the very name of John Bull is foreign.

The surname comes through France from Rome; and the Christian name comes through Rome from Palestine.

If there had really been any justification for the Teutonic generalisation, we should expect the surname to be "ox" and not "bull"; and we should expect the hero standing as godfather to be Odin or Siegfried, and not the prophet who lived on locusts in the wilderness of Palestine or the mystic who mused with his burning eyes on the blue seas around Patmos.
If our national hero is John Bull and not Olaf the Ox, it is ultimately because that blue sea has run like a blue thread through all the tapestries of our traditions; or in other words because our culture, like that of France or Flanders, came originally from the Mediterranean.
And if this is true of our use of the word "bull," it is obviously even truer of our use of the word "lion." The later emblem is enough to show that the culture came, not only from the Mediterranean, but from the southern as well as the northern side of the Mediterranean.
In other words, the Roman Empire ran all round the great inland sea; the very name of which meant, not merely the sea in the middle of the land, but more especially the sea in the middle of all the lands that mattered most to civilisation.