At length, after enduring great privations and suffering, and encountering the extreme dangers to which their frail barks were necessarily exposed from the surges which roll in perpetually from the broad Atlantic Ocean upon the coast of Spain and into the Bay of Biscay, they arrived safely on the shores of Britain.  They landed and explored the interior.  They found the island robed in the richest drapery of fruitfulness and verdure, but it was unoccupied by any thing human.  There were wild beasts roaming in the forests, and the remains of a race of giants in dens and caves—­monsters as diverse from humanity as the wolves.  Brutus and his followers attacked all these occupants of the land.  They drove the wild beasts into the mountains of Scotland and Wales, and killed the giants.  The chief of them, whose name was Gogmagog, was hurled by one of Brutus’s followers from the summit of one of the chalky cliffs which bound the island into the sea.

The island of Great Britain is in the latitude of Labrador, which on our side of the continent is the synonym for almost perpetual ice and snow; still these wandering Trojans found it a region of inexhaustible verdure, fruitfulness, and beauty; and as to its extent, though often, in modern times, called a little island, they found its green fields and luxuriant forests extending very far and wide over the sea.  A length of nearly six hundred miles would seem almost to merit the name of continent, and the dimensions of this detached outpost of the habitable surface of the earth would never have been deemed inconsiderable, had it not been that the people, by the greatness of their exploits, of which the whole world has been the theater, have made the physical dimensions of their territory appear so small and insignificant in comparison.  To Brutus and his companions the land appeared a world.  It was nearly four hundred miles in breadth at the place where they landed, and, wandering northward, they found it extending, in almost undiminished beauty and fruitfulness, further than they had the disposition to explore it.  They might have gone northward until the twilight scarcely disappeared in the summer nights, and have found the same verdure and beauty continuing to the end.  There were broad and undulating plains in the southern regions of the island, and in the northern, green mountains and romantic glens; but all, plains, valleys, and mountains, were fertile and beautiful, and teeming with abundant sustenance for flocks, for herds, and for man.

Brutus accordingly established himself upon the island with all his followers, and founded a kingdom there, over which he reigned as the founder of a dynasty.  Endless tales are told of the lives, and exploits, and quarrels of his successors down to the time of Caesar.  Conflicting claimants arose continually to dispute with each other for the possession of power; wars were made by one tribe upon another; cities, as they were called—­though probably, in