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 chap, xxxviii] OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 165 Teutonic origin ; 163 and the geography of England was univer- sally inscribed with foreign characters and appellations. The example of a revolution, so rapid and so complete, may not easily be found ; but it will excite a probable suspicion that the arts of Eome were less deeply rooted in Britain than in Gaul or Spain ; and that the native rudeness of the country and its in- habitants was covered by a thin varnish of Italian manners. This strange alteration has persuaded historians, and even servitude philosophers, that the provincials of Britain were totally exter- minated ; and that the vacant land was again peopled by the perpetual influx and rapid increase of the German colonies. Three hundred thousand Saxons are said to have obeyed the summons of Hengist ; 164 the entire emigration of the Angles was attested, in the age of Bede, by the solitude of their native country ; 16 ° and our experience has shown the free propagation of the human race, if they are cast on a fruitful wilderness, where their steps are unconfined and their subsistence is plenti- ful. The Saxon kingdoms displayed the face of recent discovery and cultivation ; the towns were small, the villages were distant ; the husbandry was languid and unskilful ; four sheep were equi- valent to an acre of the best land ; 156 an ample space of wood and morass was resigned to the vague dominion of nature ; and the modern bishopric of Durham, the whole territory from the Tyne to the Tees, had returned to its primitive state of a savage and solitary forest. 157 Such imperfect population might have been supplied, in some generations, by the English colonies ; but neither reason nor facts can justify the unnatural supposi- tion that the Saxons of Britain remained alone in the desert 153 After the first generation of Italian, or Scottish, missionaries, the dignities of the church were filled with Saxon proselytes. 154 Carte's History of England, vol. i. p. 195. He quotes the British historians ; but I much fear that Jeffrey of Monmouth (1. vi. c. 15) is his only witness. 155 Bede, Hist. Eoclesiast. 1. i. c. 15, p. 52. The fact is probable and well at- tested ; yet such was the loose intermixture of the German tribes that we find, in a subsequent period, the law of the Angli and Warini of Germany (Lindenbrog. Codex, p. 479-486). 156 See Dr. Henry's useful and laborious History of Great Britain, > vol. ii. p. 388. 157 Quicquid (says John of Tinemouth) inter Tynam et Tesam fluvios extitit sola eremi vastitudo tunc temporis fuit, et idcirco nullius ditioni servivit, eo quod sola indomitorum et sylvestrium animalium spelunca et habitatio fuit (apud Carte, vol. i. p. 195). From bishop Nicholson (English Historical Library, p. 65, 98) I u nderstand that fair copies of John of Tinemouth's ample Collections are preserved in the lib- raries of Oxford, Lambeth, &c.