ate, it must be
allowed that the actual amount of ancient remains preserved in the
Leonine and Sixtine cities is certainly above the average amount of
such remains in Roman cities elsewhere.

THE CONTINUITY OF ENGLISH HISTORY

From 'Historical Essays of Edward A. Freeman,' First Series. London,
Macmillan & Co., 1871

A comparison between the histories of England, France, and Germany,
as regards their political development, would be a subject well worth
working out in detail. Each country started with much that was common
to all three, while the separate course of each has been wholly
different. The distinctive character of English history is its
continuity. No broad gap separates the present from the past. If there
is any point at which a line between the present and the past is to be
drawn, it is at all events not to be drawn at the point where a
superficial glance might perhaps induce us to draw it,--at the Norman
invasion in 1066. At first sight, that event might seem to separate
us from all before it in a way to which there is no analogy in the
history either of our own or of kindred lands. Neither France nor
Germany ever saw any event to be compared to the Norman Conquest.
Neither of them has ever received a permanent dynasty of foreign
kings; neither has seen its lands divided among the soldiers of a
foreign army, and its native sons shut out from every position of
wealth or dignity. England, alone of the three, has undergone a real
and permanent foreign conquest. One might have expected that the
greatest of all possible historical chasms would have divided the ages
before and the ages after such an event. Yet in truth modern England
has practically far more to do with the England of the West-Saxon
kings than modern France or Germany has to do with the Gaul and
Germany of Charles the Great, or even of much more recent times. The
England of the age before the Norman Conquest is indeed, in all
external respects, widely removed from us. But the England of the age
immediately succeeding the Norman Conquest is something more widely
removed still. The age when Englishmen dwelt in their own land as a
conquered race, when their name and tongue were badges of contempt and
slavery, when England was counted for little more than an accession of
power to the Duke of Rouen in his struggle with the King of Paris, is
an age than which we can conceive none more alien to every feeling and
circumstance of our own.

Whe