connect the Celtic, as well as the Teutonic languages
with the Indo-European class, make it still more difficult to decide
between the Celtic or Teutonic origin of English words.--See Prichard on
the Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations Oxford, 1831.--M.]

[Footnote 145: In the beginning of the seventh century, the Franks and
the Anglo-Saxons mutually understood each other's language, which was
derived from the same Teutonic root, (Bede, l. i. c. 25, p. 60.)]

[Footnote 146: After the first generation of Italian, or Scottish,
missionaries, the dignities of the church were filled with Saxon
proselytes.]

This strange alteration has persuaded historians, and even philosophers,
that the provincials of Britain were totally exterminated; and that
the vacant land was again peopled by the perpetual influx, and rapid
increase, of the German colonies. Three hundred thousand Saxons are said
to have obeyed the summons of Hengist; [147] the entire emigation of the
Angles was attested, in the age of Bede, by the solitude of their native
country; [148] and our experience has shown the free propagation of the
human race, if they are cast on a fruitful wilderness, where their steps
are unconfined, and their subsistence is plentiful. The Saxon kingdoms
displayed the face of recent discovery and cultivation; the towns
were small, the villages were distant; the husbandry was languid and
unskilful; four sheep were equivalent to an acre of the best land; [149]
an ample space of wood and morass was resigned to the vague dominion of
nature; and the modern bishopric of Durham, the whole territory from the
Tyne to the Tees, had returned to its primitive state of a savage
and solitary forest. [150] Such imperfect population might have been
supplied, in some generations, by the English colonies; but neither
reason nor facts can justify the unnatural supposition, that the Saxons
of Britain remained alone in the desert which they had subdued. After
the sanguinary Barbarians had secured their dominion, and gratified
their revenge, it was their interest to preserve the peasants as well as
the cattle, of the unresisting country. In each successive revolution,
the patient herd becomes the property of its new masters; and the
salutary compact of food and labor is silently ratified by their mutual
necessities. Wilfrid, the apostle of Sussex, [151] accepted from his
royal convert the gift of the Vpeninsula of Selsey, near Chichester,
with the persons a