ical accounts of encampment and
engineering, of a busy bureaucracy and occasional frontier wars, quite
modern in their efficiency and inefficiency; and then all of a sudden we
are reading of wandering bells and wizard lances, of wars against men as
tall as trees or as short as toadstools. The soldier of civilization is
no longer fighting with Goths but with goblins; the land becomes a
labyrinth of faerie towns unknown to history; and scholars can suggest
but cannot explain how a Roman ruler or a Welsh chieftain towers up in
the twilight as the awful and unbegotten Arthur. The scientific age
comes first and the mythological age after it. One working example, the
echoes of which lingered till very late in English literature, may serve
to sum up the contrast. The British state which was found by Caesar was
long believed to have been founded by Brutus. The contrast between the
one very dry discovery and the other very fantastic foundation has
something decidedly comic about it; as if Caesar's "Et tu, Brute," might
be translated, "What, _you_ here?" But in one respect the fable is quite
as important as the fact. They both testify to the reality of the Roman
foundation of our insular society, and show that even the stories that
seem prehistoric are seldom pre-Roman. When England is Elfland, the
elves are not the Angles. All the phrases that can be used as clues
through that tangle of traditions are more or less Latin phrases. And in
all our speech there was no word more Roman than "romance."

The Roman legions left Britain in the fourth century. This did not mean
that the Roman civilization left it; but it did mean that the
civilization lay far more open both to admixture and attack.
Christianity had almost certainly come to Britain, not indeed otherwise
than by the routes established by Rome, but certainly long before the
official Roman mission of Gregory the Great. It had certainly been
largely swamped by later heathen invasions of the undefended coasts. It
may then rationally be urged that the hold both of the Empire and its
new religion were here weaker than elsewhere, and that the description
of the general civilization in the last chapter is proportionately
irrelevant. This, however, is not the chief truth of the matter.

There is one fundamental fact which must be understood of the whole of
this period. Yet a modern man must very nearly turn his mind upside down
to understand it. Almost every modern man has in his head