BEFORE TIIE RESTORATION.

5

The continental kingdoms which had risen on the ruins of chap.

the Western Empire kept up some intercourse with those-

eastern provinces where the ancient civilisation, thoughslowly fading away under the influence of misgovernment,might still astonish and instruct barbarians, where the courtstill exhibited the splendour of Diocletian and Constantine,where the public buildings were still adorned with the sculp-tures of Polycletus and the paintings of Apelles, and wherelaborious pedants, themselves destitute of taste, sense, andspirit, could still read and interpret the masterpieces ofSophocles, of Demosthenes, and of Plato. From this com-munion Britain was cut off. Her shores were, to the polishedrace which dwelt by the Bosporus, objects of a mysterioushorror, such as that with which the Ionians of the age ofHomer had regarded the Straits of Scylla and the city of theLajstrygonian cannibals. There was one province of ourisland in which, as Procopius had been told, the groundwas covered with serpents, and the air was such that no mancould inhale it and live. To this desolate region the spiritsof the departed were ferried over from the land of the Franksat midnight. A strange race of fishermen performed theghastly office. The speech of the dead was distinctly heardby the boatmen: their weight made the keel sink deep in thewater; but their forms were invisible to mortal eye. Suchwere the marvels which an able historian, the, contemporaryof Belisarius, of Simplicius j and ofTribonian, gravely re-lated in the rich and polite Constantinople, touching thecountry in which the founder of Constantinople had assumedthe imperial purple. Concerning all the other provinces ofthe Western Empire we have continuous information. It isonly in Britain that an age of fable completely separates twoages of truth. Odoacer and Totila, Euric and Thrasimund,Clovis, Fredegunda, and Brunecliild, are historical men andwomen. But Hengist and Horsa, Vortigern and Rowena,