original independence. At the end of the twelfth century there were Saxon families who had bound themselves by a perpetual vow to wear long beards from father to son in memory of the old national custom. These subjects, trodden and vilified, had the characteristic doggedness, and their predominance was sure.

A long time is required to convert a mutual hatred into harmony and peace. Two and a half centuries were needed. Among the various agencies that worked upon the hearts and habits of Norman and Saxon may be reckoned that of the clergy. Never altogether partisan, they constantly became less so. When Anselm came over from his Norman convent to be Archbishop of Canterbury, he told his countrymen plainly that a churchman acknowledged no distinction of race. Ambitious and luxurious as some were, others were humble and self-denying, and stood between the conqueror and the people, a healing influence to mitigate oppression.

The wars of the Normans made them more dependent on the Saxons, and common victories served to produce a community of interest and feeling.

The Crusades, too, by the predominant sentiment which they inspired, doubtless helped to appease the old animosities.

The gradual change in the relation of the two races, as well as an important influence in accelerating that change, is shown by the marriage of Henry the First to a Saxon princess, which soon led to the restoration of the Saxon dynasty in the person of Henry the Second. 'At present,' says an author in the time of this monarch, 'as the English and Normans dwell together, and have constantly intermarried, the two nations are so completely mingled together, that, at least as regards freemen, one can scarcely distinguish who is Norman and who English.'

The loss of Normandy snapped the threads of French connections, and the Normans, by the necessities of their isolation, began to regard England as their home, and the English as their countrymen.

Add to these causes the softening influence of time, and we are prepared for that final fusion of the Normans with the mass by which the nation became one again.

English, though shunned by cultivation and rank, remained unshaken as the popular tongue. The Norman, too, must learn

it, in order to direct his tenants. His Saxon wife speaks it, his children are accustomed to the sound of it. Slowly, by compromise and the necessity of being understood, it prevails,English still in root and sap, though saturated with the vocabulary of Norman-French.

But truly to understand the chemistry of the English nation, we must penetrate its soul, learn somewhat of its faculties and feelings, study the man invisible - the under-world of events and forms distinguish the separate moulds in which the entering elements were cast.

Celtic. To estimate the advantages of law and order, we must have stood with the stately blue-eyed Briton in his circular hut of timber and reeds, surmounted by a conical roof which served at once to admit daylight and to allow smoke to escape through a hole in the top; have seen a horseman ride in, converse with the inmates, then kick the sides of his steed and make his exit without having alighted; have sat in circle with the guests, each with his block of wood and piece of meat; have seen the whole family lie down to savage dreams around the central fire-place, while the wolf's long howl broke the silence of forest depth or wild fowls screamed across the wilderness of shallow waters; have wandered through their track-ways, careful to hasten home before the setting of the sun should cut us off from our village (a collection of huts amid fens and woods fortified with ramparts and ditches) to become the captive of an enemy or the prey of ravenous beast.

There is no property but arms and cattle. War is the favorite occupation. Bronze swords, spears, axes, and chariots with scythes projecting from the axle of the wheels, are the weapons. Every tribe has its own chief or chiefs, who call the common people together and confer with them upon all matters concerning the general welfare. The cran-tara, a stick burnt at the end and dipped in blood, carried by a dumb messenger from hamlet to hamlet, summons the warriors. A brave people, and energetic. Says Tacitus:

The Britons willingly furnish recruits to our armies; they pay the taxes without murmuring, and they perform with zeal their duties toward the government, provided they

have not to complain of oppression. When they are offended, their resentment is prompt and violent; they may be conquered, but not tamed; they may be led to obedience, but not to servitude.'

Would you know their savagery? Imagine them as old Celtic story tells-mixing the brains of their slain enemies with lime, and playing with the hard balls they made of them. Such a brainstone is said to have gone through the skull of an Irish chief, who lived afterwards seven years with two brains in his head, always sitting very still, lest in shaking himself he should die. Yet they esteem it infamous for a chieftain to close the door of his house at all, lest the stranger should come and behold his contracting soul.'

Their dead are buried in mounds. Here vases are discovered, containing their bones and ashes, together with their swords and hatchets, arrow-heads of flint and bronze, and beads of glass and amber, for they believe, after the manner of savages, that things which are useful or pleasing to the living are needed, for pleasure or use, in the shadowy realm:

'Secure beneath his ancient hill

The British warrior slumbers still;
There lie in order, still the same,

The bones which reared his stately frame;
Still at his side his spear, his bow,

As placed two thousand years ago."

The priests of their religion are the Druids, who are so careful lest their secret doctrines be revealed to the uninitiated that they teach their disciples in hidden caves and forest recesses. They are the arbiters of disputes, and the judges of crime. Whoever refuses to submit to their decree is banished from human intercourse. The young resort to them for instruction. They teach the eternal transmigration of souls. They will not worship their gods under roofs. At noon and night, within a circular area, of enormous stones and of vast circumference,' they make their appeals with sacrifices-captives and criminals, or the innocent and fair. When the priest has ripped open the

1 One of these - Stonehenge - may yet be seen standing in mysterious and awful silence on Salisbury Plain. So massive are the pieces, that it was fabled to have been built by giants or magic art:

Not less than that huge pile (from some abyss

Of mortal power unquestionably sprung,)

Whose hoary Diadem of pendant rocks

Confines the shrill-voiced whirlwind, round and round

Eddying within its vast circumference,

On Sarum's naked plain.— Wordsworth.

body of a human being or lighted the fires around a living mass, we may hear the shriek of mad excitement as the 'congregation' dance and shout. Nor is their teaching confined to their worship. Says Cæsar:

'The Druids discuss many things concerning the stars and their revolutions, the magnitude of the globe and its various divisions, the nature of the universe, energy and power of the immortal gods.'

There are bards, also, with power and privilege, who sing the praises of British heroes to the crowd. A wheel striking on strings is the instrument of these our ancestral lyrists. Among the three things which will secure a man from hunger and nakedness is the blessing of a bard. His curse brings fatalities upon man and beast.

Four hundred years cannot but have made a vast difference between the fierce savages who rushed into the sea on that old September day, and those who were citizens of the stately Roman towns or tillers of the fertile districts that lay around them. Tacitus is said to have expressed surprise at the facility and eagerness with which the Britons adopted the customs, the arts, and the garb of their conquerors. Under the Roman Empire there were British kings, of whom one of the few famous was Cunobelin - the Cymbeline of the drama. Government became more centralized. A milder worship and a more merciful law were the lot of the people. The Romans improved the agriculture of the country, and bestowed upon the cultivators 'the crooked plough' with an eight-foot beam,' of which Virgil speaks. In the middle of the fourth century, warehouses were built in Rome for the reception of corn from Britain. An export of six hundred large barks in one season assumes the existence of a large rural population. The tin and lead mines were worked with jealous care for Roman use; and the presence of cinders at this day is the visible proof of the mining and smelting of iron.

The refinement thus introduced among the Celtic Britons was not uncommunicated to the barbarous tribes whose occupation speedily followed the retirement of the imperial armies. Traces of the Roman modes of thought are indelibly stamped upon much that relates to common life. In January survives the 'Two-faced Janus'; July embalms the memory of the mighty Julius; March is the month of Mars, the god of war; and August

claims an annual reverence for the crafty Augustus. Our Mayday is the festival of Flora. Our marriage ceremonies are all Roman, the veil, the ring, the wedding gifts, the groomsmen and bridesmaids, the bride-cake. Our funeral imagery is Roman,— the cypress, the flowers strewn upon the graves, the black for mourning. The girl who says, when her ears tingle, a distant one is talking of her, recalls the Roman belief in some influence of a mesmeric nature which produced the same effect. 'A screech-owl at midnight,' says Addison, has alarmed a family more than a band of robbers.' It was ever an omen of evil. No Roman superstition was more intense. Men all on fire, walking up and down the streets, seemed to Casca a prodigy less dire than 'the bird of night' that sat

Even at noonday, upon the market-place,
Hooting and shrieking.'

But there are latent qualities here which would ornament any age. With the skin of a beast slung across his loins, the exposed parts of his body painted with sundry figures, a chain of iron about his neck as a symbol of wealth, and another about his waist, his hair hanging in curling locks and covering his shoulders,- Caractacus had stood captive in the imperial presence of Claudius, and said:

'Had my moderation in prosperity been equal to the greatness of my birth and estate, or the success of my late attempts been equal to the resolution of my mind, I might have come to this city rather as a friend to be entertained, than as a captive to be gazed upon. But what clond soever hath darkened my present lot, yet have the Heavens and Nature given me that in birth and mind which none can vanquish or deprive me of. I well see that you make other men's miseries the subject and matter of your triumphs, and in this my calamity, as in a still water, you now contemplate your own glory. Yet know that I am, and was, a prince, furnished with strength of men and habiliments of war; and what marvel is it if all be lost, seeing experience teacheth that the events of war are variable, and the success of policies guided by uncertain fates? As it is with me, who thought that the deep waters, like a wall enclosing our land, and it so situated by the gods as might have been a sufficient privilege and defense against foreign invasions: but now I perceive that the desire of your sovereignty admits no limitation; and if you Romans must command all, then all must obey. For mine own part, while I was able I made resistance; and unwilling I was to submit my neck to a servile yoke; so far the law of Nature alloweth every man, that he may defend himself being assailed, and to withstand force by force. Had I at first yielded, thy glory and my ruin had not been so renowned. Fortune hath now done her worst: we have nothing left us but our lives, which if thou take from us, our miseries end, and if thou spare us, we are but the objects of thy clemency.'

In many-colored robe, with a golden zone about her, Queen Boadicea exhorted the Britons on the eve of battle:

My friends and companions of equal fortunes!-There needeth no excuse of this my present authority or place in regard of my sex, seeing it is not unknown to you all that the