f Gregory, it was a case of _non Angli sed
diaboli_. The modern Teutonist is "disappointed" that the contemporary
authority saw nothing in his Teutons except wolves, dogs, and whelps
from the kennel of barbarism. But it is at least faintly tenable that
there was nothing else to be seen.

In any case when St. Augustine came to the largely barbarized land, with
what may be called the second of the three great southern visitations
which civilized these islands, he did not see any ethnological problems,
whatever there may have been to be seen. With him or his converts the
chain of literary testimony is taken up again; and we must look at the
world as they saw it. He found a king ruling in Kent, beyond whose
borders lay other kingdoms of about the same size, the kings of which
were all apparently heathen. The names of these kings were mostly what
we call Teutonic names; but those who write the almost entirely
hagiological records did not say, and apparently did not ask, whether
the populations were in this sense of unmixed blood. It is at least
possible that, as on the Continent, the kings and courts were almost the
only Teutonic element. The Christians found converts, they found
patrons, they found persecutors; but they did not find Ancient Britons
because they did not look for them; and if they moved among pure
Anglo-Saxons they had not the gratification of knowing it. There was,
indeed, what all history attests, a marked change of feeling towards the
marches of Wales. But all history also attests that this is always
found, apart from any difference in race, in the transition from the
lowlands to the mountain country. But of all the things they found the
thing that counts most in English history is this: that some of the
kingdoms at least did correspond to genuine human divisions, which not
only existed then but which exist now. Northumbria is still a truer
thing than Northumberland. Sussex is still Sussex; Essex is still Essex.
And that third Saxon kingdom whose name is not even to be found upon the
map, the kingdom of Wessex, is called the West Country and is to-day the
most real of them all.

The last of the heathen kingdoms to accept the cross was Mercia, which
corresponds very roughly to what we call the Midlands. The unbaptized
king, Penda, has even achieved a certain picturesqueness through this
fact, and through the forays and furious ambitions which constituted the
rest of his reputation; so much so that the othe