In deep sleep, in vision of the night, he was answered,

'Brutus there lies beyond the Gallic bounds
An Island which the western sea surrounds,
By giants once possessed; now few remain
To bar thy entrance, or obstruct thy reign.
To reach that happy shore thy sails employ;
There fate decrees to raise a second Troy,
And found an empire in thy royal line,

Which time shall ne'er destroy, nor bounds confine.'

We call these stories legendary; once-as late as the seventeenth century-they were accredited history. Certainly, the faith which received them as such seems to us better than the vicious scepticism which would beggar us of the accumulated inheritance of ages by destroying belief in the evidence. They may, and doubtless do, contain germs of truth-left on the shifting sands as wave after wave of forgotten generations broke on the shores of eternity. Many a mighty empire, it is true, has faded forever out of the memory of man; but much that was once thought irretrievably lost has been reclaimed; and, hereafter, historical science may bring to light from the dark oblivion of these pre-historic Britons more than is now dreamed of in our philosophy.

Fables of a line of kings before the Romans, have left one legend that has become to all a wondrous reality—the story of King Lear, transmuted by the alchemy of genius into perhaps the most impressive and awful tragedy in the range of dramatic literature.

Roman Conquest.-Meanwhile, our first authentic information in regard to them is given by Julius Cæsar, who, fifty-five years before Christ, led his brass-mailed legions into Britain from Gaul. If the attack was fierce, the resistance was heroic, and marks the rising pulse in that flood

'Of British freedom which, to the open sea
Of the world's praise, from dark antiquity
Hath flowed.'

While the Roman standard-bearer leaped into the waves, and bade his hesitating comrades follow, the Britons dashed into the surf to strike the invader before his foot polluted their soil. The invasion added nothing to the Roman power or pride. At the end of his campaigns, Cæsar had viewed the island rather than possessed it; and when he gave thanks at Rome to the

gods, it may be questioned whether it was for a conquest or an

escape.

Under his successors, however, about the year 85, when the Republic had become the Empire, the central and southern portion of the country became a Roman province, and was subject to Roman rule nearly four hundred years.

Slow, feeble and imperfect victory, as in the evening of a well-fought day, when the veteran's arm is less strong and his passions less violent.

Effects. During this time much was done to improve the condition of the natives. The Roman coins, laws, language, were introduced. Governed with justice, they became less estranged. Schools were established. The conquered were grouped together in cities guarded by massive walls, and linked together by a net-work of magnificent roads, which ran straight from town to town. The modern railways of England often follow the line of these Roman roads. Agriculture and the useful arts prospered. Many came from Italy, and built temples, palaces, public baths, and other splendid structures, living in great luxury and delight. Their beautiful floors, composed of differently colored brick, and arranged in elegant patterns, are occasionally unearthed for cornfields and meadows now cover this Roman splendor, and new cities have risen upon the ruins of the old.

But Roman civilization was arrested and modified by the calamities of the fifth century. In the anarchy and bloodshed of barbarian invasion, the Romanized Britons, who had thus far preserved their national identity, went down; albeit, in their fall, they were as forest leaves strewn by autumnal winds—leaving behind them a fertilizing power in the soil, whence other trees should bud and bloom in the light of other summers, and gather strength to battle with the inclemencies of other winters. The imperial armies brought with them the Christian faith; and Britain, about to undergo a new yoke, had received the principle that was destined to save her from complete desolation. Even in the savage North, where Roman arms had failed to penetrate, Christ had conquered souls.

Anglo-Saxon Conquest.-In the north and west, sheltered by their mountain fastnesses, were the Celtic Picts and Silures, whom no severity could reduce to subjection and no resistance

restrain from plunder. For two centuries they had been the terror of the civilized Britons, as wild animals harass and persecute the tame of their own species.

Side by side with them, and often driving them back upon their own territory, were the Scots, a Celtic tribe originally from Ireland, whence they crossed in so great a number in their little flat-bottomed boats as finally to give their own name to the district they invaded. In 368 we find their united hordes pursuing their depredations as far as London, and repelled with great difficulty by Theodosius, a Roman general.

Soon thereafter the Empire began falling in pieces, and at length its legions were wholly withdrawn from Britain for the defense of Italy against the Goths. The heart of the Britons was faint. They had been so long defended by their Roman masters that when left alone they were incapable of defending themselves. Piteously, but vainly, they entreated once more for protection, exclaiming, 'The barbarians drive us to the sea, and the sea drives us back to the barbarians.' In their extremity they applied, with the usual promises of land and pay, to the Germanic tribes of the Jutes, who, driven by the pressure of want or of foes from the sunless woods and foggy clime of their native Jutland, had already spread their ravages along the eastern shores of Britain, and whose pirate-boats were not improbably cruising off the coast at the moment,

'Then, sad relief, from the bleak coast that hears

The German Ocean roar, deep-blooming, strong,
And yellow-haired, the blue-eyed Saxon1 came.'

They came to stay-to settle a people and to found a state. The fame of their adventure attracted others, till, their numbers swelling, they treacherously turned their arms against the nation they came to protect, and established themselves on the fruitful plains of Kent.

From the sand-flats of Holstein and the morasses of Friesland swarmed the Saxons in successive bands, and settled, with sword and battle-axe, to the south, west and east, founding the kingdoms of Sussex, Wessex and Essex.

From the wild waste of Sleswick, swept by the blast of the North, wan and ominous, poured the Angles in a series of

1A generic name by which they and their neighbors were known to the Romans, though conveniently applied in particular to a southern tribe.

descents, and slowly, over deserted walls and polluted shrines, penetrated into the interior, effecting the settlements of Northumberland, Anglia and Mercia. They seem to have been the most numerous and energetic of the invaders, since they occupied larger districts, and in the end gave their name to the land and its people. It was now that Britain began to be called Angleland, subsequently contracted into England, meaning the ‘land of the Angles,' or 'English.'

After nearly two hundred years of bitter warfare the island was given over to the dominion of the pagan conquerors, who meantime grouped themselves into the several petty kingdoms indicated, which were collectively known as the Heptarchy. Their history is like a history of kites and crows.' Freed from the common pressure of war against the Britons, they turned their energies to combats with one another. Little by little, as the tide of supremacy rolled backward and forward, one predominated over the others, till eventually they were all made subject to Wessex in the year 827, and for the first time there was something like national unity, with the promise of national development.

Effects. The conquest, stubbornly resisted and hardly won, was a sheer dispossession of the conquered. Priests were slain at the altar, churches fired, peasants driven by the flames to fling themselves on rings of pitiless steel. Some, the wealthier, fled in panic across the Channel, and took refuge with their kindred in Brittany. Others, who would still be free, retired to Wales, which became the secure retreat of Christianity. The rest, who were not cut down, were enslaved. These are they who, attached to the soil, will rise gradually with the rise of industry, and spread by amalgamation through all ranks of society. In the ascendency of the Saxon, who caused his own language, customs, and laws to become paramount, was laid the sure foundation of the future nation-the one German state that rose on the wreck of Rome.

It is in this sanguinary and ineffectual struggle that romance places the fair Rowena, of fatal charms, with her golden winecup; the enchanter Merlin, who instructs Vortigern, king of the Britons, how to find the two sleeping dragons that hinder the building of his tower; the famous Arthur, with his Knights of the Round Table:

'The fellowship of the table round,

So famous in those days,

Whereat a hundred noble knights,

And thirty sat always.'

Danish Conquest.-But Saxon Britain was also to be brought to the brink of that servitude or extermination which her arms had brought upon the Celt. About the end of the eighth century, the roving Northmen,' pouring redundant from their bleak and barren regions, began to hover off the English coast, growing in numbers and hardihood as they crept southward to the Thames. For two hundred years the raven - dark and dreaded emblem of the Dane-was the terror and scourge of Saxon homes. After a long series of disasters, aggravated by internal feuds, Danish kings occupied the throne from 1016 till 1042, when the Saxon line was restored in the person of Edward the Confessor.

Effects. The same wild panic, as the light black skiffs strike inland along the river reaches or moor around the river islets; the same sights of horror-reddened horizons, slaughtered men, and children tossed on spikes or sold in the market-place. Christian priests were again slain at the altar. Coveting their treasures of gold and silver, but despising their more valuable ones of knowledge, they made use of books in setting fire to the monasteries. Letters and religion disappeared before these Northmen as before the Northmen of old. The arts of peace were forgotten. Light was all but quenched in a chaotic and muddy ignorance. To an England that had forgotten its origins was brought back the barbaric England of its pirate forefathers.

When it is considered that the invaders were nearly half as many as the invaded, we are prepared to believe that their influence in language, in physical type, in manners, was far greater than is usually conceded.

Norman Conquest.-When the great comet of 1060 waved over England, the enervated Saxon looked up and beheld what seemed to him a portent that should, as Milton describes it,

shake from its horrid hair

Pestilence and war.'

In the ninth century, the Northmen - these same daring and

1 The terms Northmen, Norsemen, or Scandinavians, are general designations of the inhabitants of Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden and Denmark), who at about this period were called, without distinction, Danes.