11.  The Roman government, being unable to sustain itself at home, withdrew its forces finally from Britain in the year 446, leaving the wretched inhabitants almost as savage as it found them, and in a situation even less desirable.  Deprived of their native resources, their ancient independence of spirit, as well as of the laws, customs, institutions, and leaders, that had kept them together under their old dynasties, and now deserted by their foreign protectors, they were apparently left at the mercy of blind fortune, the wretched vicissitudes of which there was none to foresee, none to resist.  The glory of the Romans now passed away.  The mighty fabric of their own proud empire crumbled into ruins.  Civil liberty gave place to barbarism; Christian truth, to papal superstition; and the lights of science were put out by both.  The shades of night gathered over all; settling and condensing, “till almost every point of that wide horizon, over which the Sun of Righteousness had diffused his cheering rays, was enveloped in a darkness more awful and more portentous than that which of old descended upon rebellious Pharaoh and the callous sons of Ham.”—­Hints on Toleration, p. 310.

12.  The Saxons entered Britain in the year 449.  But what was the form of their language at that time, cannot now be known.  It was a dialect of the Gothic or Teutonic; which is considered the parent of all the northern tongues of Europe, except some few of Sclavonian origin.  The only remaining monument of the Gothic language is a copy of the Gospels, translated by Ulphilas; which is preserved at Upsal, and called, from its embellishments, the Silver Book.  This old work has been three times printed in England.  We possess not yet in America all the advantages which may be enjoyed by literary men in the land of our ancestors; but the stores of literature, both ancient and modern, are somewhat more familiar to us, than is there supposed; and the art of printing is fast equalizing, to all nations that cultivate learning, the privilege of drinking at its ancient fountains.

13.  It is neither liberal nor just to argue unfavourably of the intellectual or the moral condition of any remote age or country, merely from our own ignorance of it.  It is true, we can derive from no quarter a favourable opinion of the state of England after the Saxon invasion, and during the tumultuous and bloody government of the heptarchy.  But I will not darken the picture through design.  If justice were done to the few names—­to Gildas the wise, the memorialist of his country’s sufferings and censor of the nation’s depravity, who appears a solitary star in the night of the sixth century—­to the venerable Bede, the greatest theologian, best scholar, and only historian of the seventh—­to Alcuin, the abbot of Canterbury, the luminary of the eighth—­to Alfred the great, the glory of the ninth, great as a prince, and greater as a scholar, seen in the evening twilight of an age in which the clergy could not read;—­if justice were done to all such, we might find something, even in these dark and rugged times, if not to soften the grimness of the portrait, at least to give greater distinctness of feature.