The History of England from the Accession of James II, vol 1 | Page 6

great
and eventful drama extending through ages, and must be very
imperfectly understood unless the plot of the preceding acts be well
known. I shall therefore introduce my narrative by a slight sketch of the
history of our country from the earliest times. I shall pass very rapidly
over many centuries: but I shall dwell at some length on the
vicissitudes of that contest which the administration of King James the
Second brought to a decisive crisis.1
Nothing in the early existence of Britain indicated the greatness which

she was destined to attain. Her inhabitants when first they became
known to the Tyrian mariners, were little superior to the natives of the
Sandwich Islands. She was subjugated by the Roman arms; but she
received only a faint tincture of Roman arts and letters. Of the western
provinces which obeyed the Caesars, she was the last that was
conquered, and the first that was flung away. No magnificent remains
of Latin porches and aqueducts are to be found in Britain. No writer of
British birth is reckoned among the masters of Latin poetry and
eloquence. It is not probable that the islanders were at any time
generally familiar with the tongue of their Italian rulers. From the
Atlantic to the vicinity of the Rhine the Latin has, during many
centuries, been predominant. It drove out the Celtic; it was not driven
out by the Teutonic; and it is at this day the basis of the French,
Spanish and Portuguese languages. In our island the Latin appears
never to have superseded the old Gaelic speech, and could not stand its
ground against the German.
The scanty and superficial civilisation which the Britons had derived
from their southern masters was effaced by the calamities of the fifth
century. In the continental kingdoms into which the Roman empire was
then dissolved, the conquerors learned much from the conquered race.
In Britain the conquered race became as barbarous as the conquerors.
All the chiefs who founded Teutonic dynasties in the continental
provinces of the Roman empire, Alaric, Theodoric, Clovis, Alboin,
were zealous Christians. The followers of Ida and Cerdic, on the other
hand, brought to their settlements in Britain all the superstitions of the
Elbe. While the German princes who reigned at Paris, Toledo, Arles,
and Ravenna listened with reverence to the instructions of bishops,
adored the relics of martyrs, and took part eagerly in disputes touching
the Nicene theology, the rulers of Wessex and Mercia were still
performing savage rites in the temples of Thor and Woden.
The continental kingdoms which had risen on the ruins of the Western
Empire kept up some intercourse with those eastern provinces where
the ancient civilisation, though slowly fading away under the influence
of misgovernment, might still astonish and instruct barbarians, where

the court still exhibited the splendour of Diocletian and Constantine,
where the public buildings were still adorned with the sculptures of
Polycletus and the paintings of Apelles, and where laborious pedants,
themselves destitute of taste, sense, and spirit, could still read and
interpret the masterpieces of Sophocles, of Demosthenes, and of Plato.
From this communion Britain was cut off. Her shores were, to the
polished race which dwelt by the Bosphorus, objects of a mysterious
horror, such as that with which the Ionians of the age of Homer had
regarded the Straits of Scylla and the city of the Laestrygonian
cannibals. There was one province of our island in which, as Procopius
had been told, the ground was covered with serpents, and the air was
such that no man could inhale it and live. To this desolate region the
spirits of the departed were ferried over from the land of the Franks at
midnight. A strange race of fishermen performed the ghastly office.
The speech of the dead was distinctly heard by the boatmen, their
weight made the keel sink deep in the water; but their forms were
invisible to mortal eye. Such were the marvels which an able historian,
the contemporary of Belisarius, of Simplicius, and of Tribonian,
gravely related in the rich and polite Constantinople, touching the
country in which the founder of Constantinople had assumed the
imperial purple. Concerning all the other provinces of the Western
Empire we have continuous information. It is only in Britain that an
age of fable completely separates two ages of truth. Odoacer and Totila,
Euric and Thrasimund, Clovis, Fredegunda, and Brunechild, are
historical men and women. But Hengist and Horsa, Vortigern and
Rowena, Arthur and Mordred are mythical persons, whose very
existence may be questioned, and whose adventures must be classed
with those of Hercules and Romulus
At length the darkness begins to break; and the country which had been
lost to view as Britain reappears as England. The conversion of the
Saxon colonists to Christianity was the first