axon
invasion, and hear of the decay, the feebleness, the cowardice, and the
misery of the Britons--all which attributes have been somewhat too
readily bestowed upon the population which the Romans had left
behind--it would be well to consider what these so-called Britons really
were, to enable us properly to understand the transition state through
which the country passed.

Our first native historian is Gildas, who lived in the middle of the
sixth century. "From the early part of the fifth century, when the Greek
and Roman writers cease to notice the affairs of Britain, his narrative,
on whatever authority it may have been founded, has been adopted without
question by Bede and succeeding authors, and accepted, notwithstanding
its barrenness of facts and pompous obscurity, by all but general
consent, as the basis of early English history." Gibbon has justly
pointed out his inconsistencies, his florid descriptions of the
flourishing condition of agriculture and commerce after the departure of
the Romans, and his denunciations of the luxury of the people; when he,
at the same time, describes a race who were ignorant of the arts,
incapable of building walls of defence, or of arming themselves with
proper weapons. When "this monk," as Gibbon calls him, "who, in the
profound ignorance of human life, presumes to exercise the office of
historian," tells us that the Romans, who were occasionally called in to
aid against the Picts and Scots, "give energetic counsel to the timorous
natives, and leave them patterns by which to manufacture arms," we seem
to be reading an account of some remote tribe, to whom the Roman sword
and buckler were as unfamiliar as the musket was to the Otaheitans when
Cook first went among them.

When Gildas describes the soldiers on the wall as "equally slow to fight
and ill-adapted to run away"; and tells the remarkable incident which
forms part of every schoolboy's belief, that the defenders of the wall
were pulled down by great hooked weapons and dashed against the ground,
we feel a pity akin to contempt for a people so stupid and passive, and
are not altogether sorry that the Picts and Scots, "differing one from
another in manners, but inspired with the same avidity for blood," had
come with their bushy beards and their half-clothed bodies, to supplant
so effeminate a race. When he makes this feeble people send an embassy
to a Roman in Gaul to say, "The barbarians drive us to the sea; the sea
throw