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 chap, xxxviii] OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 159 A monk, who, in the profound ignorance of human life, has state of the presumed to exercise the office of historian, strangely disfigures the state of Britain at the time of its separation from the Western empire. Gildas 139 describes, in florid language, the im- provements of agriculture, the foreign trade which flowed with every tide into the Thames and the Severn, the solid and lofty construction of public and private edifices ; he accuses the sinful luxury of the British people ; of a people, according to the same writer, ignorant of the most simple arts, and incapable, without the aid of the Eomans, of providing walls of stone or weapons of iron for the defence of their native land. 140 Under the long dominion of the emperors, Britain had been insensibly moulded into the elegant and servile form of a Roman province, whose safety was entrusted to a foreign power. The subjects of Honorius contemplated their new freedom with surprise and terror; they were left destitute of any civil or military con- stitution ; and their uncertain rulers wanted either skill, or courage, or authority, to direct the public force against the common enemy. The introduction of the Saxons betrayed their internal weakness and degraded the character both of the prince and people. Their consternation magnified the danger ; the want of union diminished their resources ; and the mad- ness of civil factions was more solicitous to accuse than to remedy the evils which they imputed to the misconduct of their adversaries. Yet the Britons were not ignorant, they could not be ignorant of the manufacture or the use of arms : the successive and disorderly attacks of the Saxons allowed them to recover from their amazement, and the prosperous or ad- verse events of the war added discipline and experience to their native valour. While the continent of Europe and Africa yielded, without Their resistance, to the Barbarians, the British island, alone and un- aided, maintained a long, a vigorous, though an unsuccessful struggle against the formidable pirates who, almost at the same instant, assaulted the Northern, the Eastern, and the Southern coasts. The cities, which had been fortified with skill, were 139 See Gildas de Excidio Britannia, c. i. p. 1, edit. Gale. 140 Mr. Whitaker (History of Manchester, vol. ii. p. 503, 516) has smartly ex- posed this glaring absurdity, which had passed unnoticed by the general historians, as they were hastening to more interesting and important events.