and flee before the approaching storm; but by no means all, I think.  For (since, where all is uncertain, we must reason from what is probable of human nature) in the first place men with large estates do not behave in that way before a danger which creeps upon them little by little, as this Saxon danger did.  These colonists could not dig up their fields and carry them over to Gaul.  They did not keep banking accounts; and in the course of four hundred years their main wealth had certainly been sunk in the land.  They could not carry away their villas.  We know that many of them did not carry away the tessellae for which (as we have seen) they had so peculiar a veneration; for these remain.  Secondly, if the colonists left Britain in a mass, when in the middle of the sixth century we find Belisarius offering the Goths to trade Britain for Sicily, as being ’much larger and this long time subservient to Roman rule,’[2] we must suppose either (as Freeman appears to suppose) that Belisarius did not know what he was offering, or that he was attempting a gigantic ‘bluff,’ or lastly that he really was offering an exchange not flatly derisory; of which three possible suppositions I prefer the last as the likeliest.  Nor am I the less inclined to choose it, because these very English historians go on to clear the ground in a like convenient way of the Celtic inhabitants, exterminating them as they exterminated the Romans, with a wave of the hand, quite in the fashion of Mr Podsnap.  ’This is un-English:  therefore for me it merely ceases to exist.’

‘Probable extirpation of the Celtic inhabitants’ jots down Freeman in his margin, and proceeds to write: 

In short, though the literal extirpation of a nation is an impossibility, there is every reason to believe that the Celtic inhabitants of those parts of Britain which had become English at the end of the sixth century had been as nearly extinguished as a nation could be.  The women doubtless would be largely spared, but as far as the male sex is concerned we may feel sure that death, emigration, or personal slavery were the only alternatives which the vanquished found at the hands of our fathers.

Upon this passage, if brought to me in an undergraduate essay, I should have much to say.  The style, with its abstract nouns (’the literal extirpation of a nation is an impossibility’), its padding and periphrasis (’there is every reason to believe’ ... ’as far as the male sex is concerned we may feel sure’) betrays the loose thought.  It begins with ‘in short’ and proceeds to be long-winded.  It commits what even schoolboys know to be a solecism by inviting us to consider three ‘alternatives’; and what can I say of ’the women doubtless would be largely spared,’ save that besides scanning in iambics it says what Freeman never meant and what no-one outside of an Aristophanic comedy could ever suggest?  ‘The women doubtless would be largely spared’!  It reminds me of the young lady in Cornwall who, asked by her vicar if she had been confirmed, admitted blushingly that ’she had reason to believe, partially so.’