It is on this darkened theatre that some old writers have introduced those characters and actions which have afforded such ample matter to poets and so much perplexity to historians.  This is the fabulous and heroic age of our nation.  After the natural and just representations of the Roman scene, the stage is again crowded with enchanters, giants, and all the extravagant images of the wildest and most remote antiquity.  No personage makes so conspicuous a figure in these stories as King Arthur:  a prince whether of British or Roman origin, whether born on this island or in Amorica, is uncertain; but it appears that he opposed the Saxons with remarkable virtue and no small degree of success, which has rendered him and his exploits so large an argument of romance that both are almost disclaimed by history.  Light scarce begins to dawn until the introduction of Christianity, which, bringing with it the use of letters and the arts of civil life, affords at once a juster account of things and facts that are more worthy of relation:  nor is there, indeed, any revolution so remarkable in the English story.

The bishops of Rome had for some time meditated the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons.  Pope Gregory, who is surnamed the Great, affected that pious design with an uncommon zeal; and he at length found a circumstance highly favorable to it in the marriage of a daughter of Charibert, a king of the Franks, to the reigning monarch of Kent.  This opportunity induced Pope Gregory to commission Augustin, a monk of Rheims, and a man of distinguished piety, to undertake this arduous enterprise.

[Sidenote:  A.D. 600]

It was in the year of Christ 600, and 150 years after the coming of the first Saxon colonies into England, that Ethelbert, king of Kent, received intelligence of the arrival in his dominions of a number of men in a foreign garb, practising several strange and unusual ceremonies, who desired to be conducted to the king’s presence, declaring that they had things to communicate to him and to his people of the utmost importance to their eternal welfare.  This was Augustin, with forty of the associates of his mission, who now landed in the Isle of Thanet, the same place by which the Saxons had before entered, when they extirpated Christianity.

The king heard them in the open air, in order to defeat,[28] upon a principle of Druidical superstition, the effects of their enchantments.  Augustin spoke by a Frankish interpreter.  The Franks and Saxons were of the same origin, and used at that time the same language.  He was favorably received; and a place in the city of Canterbury, the capital of Kent, was allotted for the residence of him and his companions.  They entered Canterbury in procession, preceded by two persons who bore a silver cross and the figure of Christ painted on a board, singing, as they went, litanies to avert the wrath of God from that city and people.