lies in the ocean, against the
mouth of the Rhine, and less than thirty miles from the continent; that
it is possessed by three nations, the Frisians, the Angles, and the
Britons; and that some Angles had appeared at Constantinople, in the
train of the French ambassadors. From these ambassadors Procopius might
be informed of a singular, though not improbable, adventure, which
announces the spirit, rather than the delicacy, of an English heroine.
She had been betrothed to Radiger, king of the Varni, a tribe of Germans
who touched the ocean and the Rhine; but the perfidious lover was
tempted, by motives of policy, to prefer his father's widow, the sister
of Theodebert, king of the Franks. The forsaken princess of the Angles,
instead of bewailing, revenged her disgrace. Her warlike subjects are
said to have been ignorant of the use, and even of the form, of a horse;
but she boldly sailed from Britain to the mouth of the Rhine, with a
fleet of four hundred ships, and an army of one hundred thousand men.
After the loss of a battle, the captive Radiger implored the mercy of
his victorious bride, who generously pardoned his offence, dismissed her
rival, and compelled the king of the Varni to discharge with honor and
fidelity the duties of a husband. This gallant exploit appears to be the
last naval enterprise of the Anglo-Saxons. The arts of navigation, by
which they acquired the empire of Britain and of the sea, were soon
neglected by the indolent Barbarians, who supinely renounced all the
commercial advantages of their insular situation. Seven independent
kingdoms were agitated by perpetual discord; and the _British world_ was
seldom connected, either in peace or war, with the nations of the
Continent.

I have now accomplished the laborious narrative of the decline and fall
of the Roman empire, from the fortunate age of Trajan and the Antonines,
to its total extinction in the West, about five centuries after the
Christian era. At that unhappy period, the Saxons fiercely struggled
with the natives for the possession of Britain: Gaul and Spain were
divided between the powerful monarchies of the Franks and Visigoths, and
the dependent kingdoms of the Suevi and Burgundians: Africa was exposed
to the cruel persecution of the Vandals, and the savage insults of the
Moors: Rome and Italy, as far as the banks of the Danube, were afflicted
by an army of Barbarian mercenaries, whose lawless tyranny was succeeded
by the reign of Theodo