k
of master-generals of the Imperial armies. Such was the involuntary
reverence which the Roman name still impressed on the minds of those
warriors, who had borne away in triumph the spoils of the Capitol.

Whilst Italy was ravaged by the Goths, and a succession of feeble
tyrants oppressed the provinces beyond the Alps, the British island
separated itself from the body of the Roman empire. The regular forces,
which guarded that remote province, had been gradually withdrawn; and
Britain was abandoned without defence to the Saxon pirates, and
the savages of Ireland and Caledonia. The Britons, reduced to this
extremity, no longer relied on the tardy and doubtful aid of a declining
monarchy. They assembled in arms, repelled the invaders, and rejoiced
in the important discovery of their own strength. Afflicted by similar
calamities, and actuated by the same spirit, the Armorican provinces (a
name which comprehended the maritime countries of Gaul between the
Seine and the Loire ) resolved to imitate the example of the neighboring
island. They expelled the Roman magistrates, who acted under the
authority of the usurper Constantine; and a free government was
established among a people who had so long been subject to the arbitrary
will of a master. The independence of Britain and Armorica was soon
confirmed by Honorius himself, the lawful emperor of the West; and the
letters, by which he committed to the new states the care of their own
safety, might be interpreted as an absolute and perpetual abdication of
the exercise and rights of sovereignty. This interpretation was, in
some measure, justified by the event. After the usurpers of Gaul had
successively fallen, the maritime provinces were restored to the empire.
Yet their obedience was imperfect and precarious: the vain, inconstant,
rebellious disposition of the people, was incompatible either with
freedom or servitude; and Armorica, though it could not long maintain
the form of a republic, was agitated by frequent and destructive
revolts. Britain was irrecoverably lost. But as the emperors wisely
acquiesced in the independence of a remote province, the separation was
not imbittered by the reproach of tyranny or rebellion; and the claims
of allegiance and protection were succeeded by the mutual and voluntary
offices of national friendship.

This revolution dissolved the artificial fabric of civil and military
government; and the independent country, during a period of forty
y