is always
passed in a casual sentence, as if a merely political one, and while
page after page is spent in following the alternations of furious
crime and fatal chance, in the contests between Fredegonde and
Brunehaut, no historian ever considers whether the great Ostrogoth who
wore in the battle of Verona the dress which his mother had woven for
him, was likely to have chosen a wife without love!--or how far the
perfectness, justice, and temperate wisdom of every ordinance of his
reign was owing to the sympathy and counsel of his Frankish queen.

You have to recollect, then, thus far, only three cardinal dates:--

449. Saxon invasion.
481. Clovis reigns and St. Benedict is born.
493. Theodoric conquers at Verona.

Then, roughly, a hundred years later, in 590, Ethelbert, the fifth
from Hengist, and Bertha, the third from Clotilde, are king and queen
of Kent. I cannot find the date of their marriage, but the date, 590,
which you must recollect for cardinal, is that of Gregory's accession
to the pontificate, and I believe Bertha was then in middle life,
having persevered in her religion firmly, but inoffensively, and
made herself beloved by her husband and people. She, in England,
Theodolinda in Lombardy, and St. Gregory in Rome:--in their hands,
virtually lay the destiny of Europe.

Then the period from Bertha to Osburga, 590 to 849--say 250 years--is
passed by the Saxon people in the daily more reverent learning of the
Christian faith, and daily more peaceful and skilful practice of the
humane arts and duties which it invented and inculcated.

The statement given by Sir Edward Creasy of the result of these 250
years of lesson is, with one correction, the most simple and just that
I can find.

"A few years before the close of the sixth century, the country was
little more than a wide battle-field, where gallant but rude warriors
fought with each other, or against the neighbouring Welsh or Scots;
unheeding and unheeded by the rest of Europe, or, if they attracted
casual attention, regarded with dread and disgust as the fiercest of
barbarians and the most untameable of pagans. In the eighth century,
England was looked up to with admiration and gratitude, as superior to
all the other countries of Western Europe in piety and learning, and
as the land whence the most zealous and successful saints and teachers
came forth to convert and enlighten the still barbarous regions of the
continent."

This statement is