way in the other
world. But, what is oddest of all, a few of the graves in this earliest
English cemetery are Roman in character, and in them the interment is
made in the Roman fashion. The inference is almost irresistible that
the first settlement of Thanet by the English was a purely friendly
one, and that Roman and Jute lived on side by side as neighbours and
allies on the Kentish island.

I don't doubt, myself, that the whole settlement of Kent was equally
friendly, and that the population of the county contains throughout an
almost balanced mixture of Celtic and Teutonic elements.

However, the century and a half that succeeded the English colonization
of south-eastern Britain were, no doubt, a time of great retrogression
towards barbarism, as everywhere else in Romanised Europe. The villas
that must have covered the gentle slopes towards the Wantsum fell into
decay; the fortresses were destroyed; the roads ran wild; and the sea
and river began slowly to slit up the central part of the great
navigable backwater. A hundred and fifty years after Hengest and Horsa,
if those excellent gentlemen ever really existed, another famous
landing took place in Thanet. Augustine and his companions disembarked
at Ebb's Fleet, and held close by (on the hill behind Prospect House)
their first interview with AEthelberht. But though this epoch-making
event happened to occur in Thanet, it has no special connection with
the history of the island, any further than as a component of England
generally. And indeed, even through the garbled version of Bede, it is
plain enough to see that British Christendom was not yet wholly wiped
out in eastern Britain. The conversion of Kent was essentially a
conversion of the king and nobles to the Roman communion; it brought
back once more the part of Britain most in connection with the
continent into the broad fold of continental Christendom. It is quite
clear, in fact, that Rutupiae and Durovernum, Richborough and
Canterbury, had never ceased to hold close intercourse with the
opposite shore, whose cliffs still shine so distinctly from the hills
about Ramsgate. For AEthelberht himself was married to a Christian
Frankish princess of the house of the Merwings; and coins of the
Frankish kings and of the Byzantine emperors have been found on the
surface or in contemporary Jutish graves in Kent.

It is interesting to observe, too, that of the monks whom Gregory chose
to accompany Augustine on his easy