cure their future, and a ceaseless struggle
with opposing elements that threatened their ruin.

The object of universal history is to place before our eyes the
leading changes, and the conflicts of nations, together with their
causes and results. Our purpose is to depict the history of one of the
chief of the Western nations, the English, and that too in an age
which decisively modified both its inner constitution and its outward
position in the world, but it cannot be understood unless we first
pourtray, with a few quick touches, the historical events under the
influence of which it became civilised and great.

CHAPTER I.

THE BRITONS, ROMANS, AND ANGLO-SAXONS.

The history of Western Europe in general opens with the struggle
between Kelts, Romans, and Germans, which determined out of what
elements modern nations should be formed.

Just as it is supposed that Albion in early times was connected with
the Continent, and only separated from it by the raging sea-flood
which buried the intermediate lands in the abyss, so in ethnographic
relations it would seem as if the aboriginal Keltic tribes of the
island had been only separated by some accident from those which
occupied Gaul and the Netherlands. The Channel is no national
boundary. We find Belgians in Britain, Britons in Eastern Gaul, and
very many names of peoples common to both coasts; there were tribes
which, though separated by the sea, yet acknowledged the same prince.
Without being able to prove how far natives of the island took part in
the expeditions of conquest, which pouring forth from Gaul inundated
the countries on the Danube and Italy, Greece and Western Asia, we yet
can trace the affinity of names and tribes as far as these expeditions
extend. This island was the home of the religion that gave a certain
unity to the populations, which, though closely akin, nevertheless
contended with each other in ceaseless discord. It was that Druidic
discipline which combined a priestly constitution with civil
privileges, and with a very peculiar doctrine of a political and even
moral purport. We might be tempted to suppose that the atrocity of
human sacrifice was first introduced among them by the Punic race. For
they were from primeval times connected with the Carthaginians and
Phoenicians, who were the first to traverse the outer sea, and sought
in the island a metal which was very valuable for the wants of the
ancient world. Distant clans might retain