waste betwixt the Jutes and Saxons, came the men of East Anglia, Mercia, and all North-humbria. Their leaders were two brothers Hengest and Horsa: they were the sons of Wihtgils; Wihtgils son of Witta, Witta of Wecta, Wecta of Woden; from this Woden sprang all our royal families, and those of the South-humbrians also.

A. 455. This year Hengest and Horsa fought against King Wyrtgeoone at the place which is called Ægelsthress, and his brother Horsa was there slain, and after that Hengest obtained the kingdom, and Æsc his son.

A. 457. This year Hengest and Esc his son fought against the Britons at the place which is called Crecganford, and there slew four thousand men; and the Britons then forsook Kent, and in great terror fled to London.

A. 465.—This year Hengest and Æsc fought against the Welsh near Wippeelsfleet, and there slew twelve Welsh ealdormen, and one of their own thanes was slain there, whose name was Wippeel. A. 473. This year Hengest and Æsc fought against the Welsh, and took spoils innumerable; and the Welsh fled from the Angles like fire.

Destruction of the Roman Civilization.

GUIZOT.

M. GUIZOT, in his "History of Civilization in France," has some general remarks on the consequences that followed the overthrow of the Roman power by barbarian tribes. These apply to the constitution of England as well as to that of France; and we therefore extract the following from Mr. Hazlitt's translation.

It seems to me that people commonly form to themselves a very false idea of the invasion of the barbarians, and of the extent and rapidity of its effects. You have, in your reading upon this subject, often met with the words inundation, earthquake, conflagration. These are the terms which have been employed to characterize this revolution. I think that they are deceptive, that

they in no way represent the manner in which this invasion occurred, nor its immediate results. Exaggeration is natural to human language; words express the impressions which man receives from facts, rather than the facts themselves; it is after having passed through the mind of man, and according to the impressions which they have produced thereupon, that facts are described and named. But the impression is never the complete and faithful image of the fact. In the first place, it is individual, which the fact is not; great events, the invasion of a foreign people, for instance, are related by those who have been personally affected, as victims, actors, or spectators: they relate the event as they have seen it; they characterize it according to what they have known or undergone. He who has seen his house or his village burnt, will, perhaps, call the invasion a conflagration: to the thought of another, it will be found arrayed in the form of a deluge or an earthquake. These images are true, but are of a truth which, if I may so express myself, is full of prejudice and egoism; they reproduce the impressions of some few men; they are not expressions of the fact in its entire extent nor of the manner in which it impressed the whole of the country.

Such, moreover, is the instinctive poetry of the human mind, that it receives from facts an impression which is livelier and greater than are the facts themselves; it is its tendency to extend and ennoble them; they are for it but matter which it fashions and forms, a theme upon which it exercises itself, and from which it draws, or rather over which it spreads beauties and effects which were not really there. Thus, a double and contrary cause fills language with illusion; under a material point of view, facts are greater than man, and he perceives and describes of them only that which strikes him personally; under the moral point of view, man is greater than facts; and, in describing them, he lends them something of his own greatness.

This is what we must never forget in studying history, particularly in reading contemporary documents; they are at once incomplete and exaggerated; they omit and amplify: we must always distrust the impression conveyed by them, both as too

narrow and as too poetical; we must both add to and take from it. Nowhere does this double error appear more strongly than in the narratives of the Germanic invasion; the words by which it has been described in no way represent it.

The invasion, or rather, the invasions, were events which were essentially partial, local, and momentary. A band arrived, usually far from numerous; the most powerful, those who founded kingdoms, as the band of Clovis, scarcely numbered from five thousand to six thousand men; the entire nation of the Burgundians did not exceed sixty thousand men. It rapidly overran a limited territory; ravaged a district; attacked a city, and sometimes retreated, carrying away its booty, and sometimes settled somewhere, always careful not to disperse itself too much. We know with what facility and promptitude such events accomplish themselves and disappear. Houses are burnt, fields are devastated, crops carried off, men killed or led away prisoners: all this evil over, at the end of a few days the waves close, the ripple subsides, individual sufferings are forgotten, society returns, at least in appearance, to its former state. This was the condition of things in Gaul during the fourth century.

But we also know that the human society, that society which we call a people, is not a simple juxta-position of isolated and fugitive existence: were it nothing more, the invasions of the barbarians would not have produced the impression which the documents of the epoch depict; for a long while the number of places and men that suffered therefrom was far inferior to the number of those who escaped. But the social life of each man is not concentrated in the material space which is its theatre, nor in the passing moment; it extends itself to all the relations which he has contracted upon different points of the land; and not only to those relations which he has contracted, but also to those which he might contract, or can even conceive the possibility of contracting; it embraces not only the present, but the future; man lives in a thousand spots which he does not inhabit, in a thousand moments which, as yet, are not; and if this development of his life is cut off from him if he is forced to confine himself to the

narrow limits of his material and actual existence, to isolate himself in space and time, social life is mutilated, and society is

no more.

And this was the effect of the invasions, of those apparitions of barbarous hordes, short, it is true, and limited, but reviving without cessation, everywhere possible, and always imminent: they destroyed, 1st, all regular, habitual, and easy correspondence between the various parts of the territory; 2nd, all security, all sure prospect of the future; they broke the ties which bound together the inhabitants of the same country, the moments of the same life; they isolated men, and the days of each man. In many places, and for many years, the aspect of the country might remain the same; but the social organization was attacked, the members no longer held together, the muscles no longer played, the blood no longer circulated freely or surely in the veins the disease appeared sometimes at one point, sometimes at another: a town was pillaged, a road rendered impassable, a bridge destroyed; such or such a communication ceased; the culture of the land became impossible in such or such a district: in a word, the organic harmony, the general activity of the social body, were each day fettered and disturbed; each day dissolution and paralysis made some new advance.

Thus was Roman society destroyed in Gaul; not as a valley is ravaged by a torrent, but as the most solid body is disorganized by the continual infiltration of a foreign substance. Between all the members of the state, between all the moments of the life of each man, the barbarians continually intruded themselves. I lately endeavoured to paint to you the dismemberment of the Roman empire, the impossibility under which its masters found themselves of holding together the different parts, and how the imperial administration was obliged to retire spontaneously from Britain, from Gaul, incapable of resisting the dissolution of that vast body. What occurred in the Empire occurred equally in each province; as the Empire had suffered disorganization, so did each province; the cantons, the towns detached themselves, and returned to a local and isolated existence. The invasion

operated everywhere in the same manner, and everywhere produced the same effects. All the ties by which Rome had been enabled, after so many efforts, to combine together the different parts of the world; that great system of administration, of imposts, of recruiting, of public works, of roads, had not been able to support itself. There remained of it nothing but what could subsist in an isolated and local condition, that is to say, nothing but the wrecks of the municipal system. The inhabitants shut themselves up in the towns, where they continued to govern themselves nearly as they had done of old, with the same rights, by the same institutions. A thousand circumstances prove this concentration of society in towns; here is one which has been little noticed. Under the Roman administration, it is the governors of provinces, the consuls, the correctors, the presidents who fill the scene, and appear continually in the laws and history; in the sixth century, their names become much more rare; we, indeed, still meet with dukes and counts, to whom the government of the provinces was confided; the barbarian kings strove to inherit the Roman administration, to preserve the same officers, and to induce their power to flow in the same channels; but they succeeded only very incompletely, and with great disorder: their dukes were rather military chiefs than administrators; it is manifest that the governors of provinces had no longer the same importance, and no longer played the same part; the governors of towns now filled history; the majority of these counts of Chilperic, of Gontran, of Theodebert, whose exactions are related by Gregory of Tours, are counts of towns established within their walls, and by the side of their bishop. I should exaggerate were I to say that the province disappeared, but it became disorganized, and lost all consistency, and almost all reality. The towns, the primitive elements of the Roman world, survived almost alone amidst its ruin. The rural districts became the prey of the barbarians, it was there that they established themselves with their men; it was there that they were about to introduce by degrees totally new institutions, and a new organization, but till then the rural districts will occupy scarcely any place