sels coming up the Thames.

~appointments~: furniture, fittings.

~mimics~: actors who played in farces, like our panto_mimes_.

~scribes~: among the Romans, clerks in public offices.

7. AFTER THE ROMANS. PART III.

~Alaric~, king of a German tribe called the Visigoths (West Goths)
invaded Greece and Italy, and after several defeats finally took and
sacked Rome in 410 A.D. It was this state of thing which compelled the
Romans to withdraw their troops from Britain.

~The West where the Britons still held their own~: Wales and Cornwall
were never occupied by the invading Saxons: Welsh and Cornishmen are
Celts, with a language of their own in Wales, while the Cornish language
has only disappeared during the last hundred years.

~Wessex~: the land of the West Saxons corresponds roughly to England
south of the Thames.

~oblivion~: being forgotten.

~The river Lea~ rises in Bedfordshire, near Luton, passes Hertford and
Ware, forms the boundary between Middlesex and Essex, and falls into the
Thames at Blackwall, after a course of forty miles.

~quagmires~: marshy, boggy ground that _quakes_ under the feet (quake,
mire).

8. THE FIRST SAXON SETTLEMENT.

~Ecclesiastic~: connected with the Church. For many centuries Rome was
the centre of Christian influence, and is so still to all Roman
Catholics.

~ritual~: the customs and ceremonies employed in performing service in a
church.

~Gregory I.~ or ~the Great~ was Pope from 590-604 A.D. He it was who
sent Augustine to attempt the conversion of the English in the year 597.

~kinglet~: a petty king. England was then divided among many kings, so
that the realm of each was necessarily very small.

~crucifix~: a figure of Christ fixed to the cross.

~Bede~: a monk and Church historian who lived and died at Jarrow in
county Durham in 735 A.D.

~Lindesfarne~, or Holy Island, off the coast of Northumberland.

~Northumbrians~: the men of Northumbria--that is, Yorkshire, Durham, and
Northumberland.

~Mercians~: the men of Mercia, or land of the Middle English.

~supremacy~: Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex, were separate kingdoms which
were successively, in the order in which they are given, strong enough
to overawe or exercise supremacy over the others. The king of Wessex
eventually became king of England.

~Witan~, or in its fuller form ~wit-an-a-ge-mote~, the 'meeting of wise
men,' was the national council which afterwards grew up into our modern
parliament.