arts of Scotland north of Perthshire and
Forfar may be regarded as the principal refuge of the remnant of the
people whom we have described as the earlier race, before the Celts; and
there were traces of them left in almost all the parts occupied by their
immediate successors the Celts. The name by which we ought probably to
call these latter, the Celts, in whatever part of the islands they might
be, has been familiarly used in a sense so limited that it might cause
confusion to use it now in its larger sense. I mean Gael, and Gaelic.

Now we gather from the records that before the Jutes and the Angles and
the Saxons came, and in their turn drove the Britons north and west, the
religion of Christ had spread to all parts of the territory occupied by
the Britons, that is, to the towns in all parts. It may very well have
been that in the country parts there were many pagans left even to the
last, perhaps in towns too. Putting the commencement of the driving out of
the Britons at about the year 450 after Christ, we know that less than a
hundred years before that time the pagans were so numerous in Gaul, that
when Martin became Bishop of Tours, the pagans were everywhere, and to
work for their conversion would have been sufficient work for him. As for
the towns in Gaul, Hilary, the Bishop of Poitiers, was a leading official
in that town, and only became a Christian in the year 350, when he was
about thirty-five years of age. Martin of Tours, too, was born a heathen.
We may be sure that in Britain, so remote from the centres of influence,
and so inaccessible by reason of its insular position, that state of
things continued to prevail a good deal longer than in the civilised parts
of Gaul. We must not credit our British predecessors with anything like a
universal knowledge and acceptance of Christianity.

It is not necessary to dwell on the familiar fact of the intermixture of
the Romans and the Britons. In the more important towns there was much
blending of the two races, and the luxurious arts of Rome produced their
effect in softening the British spirit. The Briton gave up more than he
gained in the mixed marriages, and it seems clear that the Romano-Britons
who were left to face the barbarous Picts and Scots, and the hardy Angles
and Saxons, were by comparison an enervated race. In the parts further
remote from commercial and municipal centres, and from the military lines,
it is probable that the invaders found much tougher