took part eagerly in disputes touching the Nicene theology, the
rulers of Wessex and Mercia were still performing savage rites in
the temples of Thor and Woden.

The continental kingdoms which had risen on the ruins of the
Western Empire kept up some intercourse with those eastern
provinces where the ancient civilisation, though slowly fading
away under the influence of misgovernment, might still astonish
and instruct barbarians, where the court still exhibited the
splendour of Diocletian and Constantine, where the public
buildings were still adorned with the sculptures of Polycletus
and the paintings of Apelles, and where laborious pedants,
themselves destitute of taste, sense, and spirit, could still
read and interpret the masterpieces of Sophocles, of Demosthenes,
and of Plato. From this communion Britain was cut off. Her shores
were, to the polished race which dwelt by the Bosphorus, objects
of a mysterious horror, such as that with which the Ionians of
the age of Homer had regarded the Straits of Scylla and the city
of the Laestrygonian cannibals. There was one province of our
island in which, as Procopius had been told, the ground was
covered with serpents, and the air was such that no man could
inhale it and live. To this desolate region the spirits of the
departed were ferried over from the land of the Franks at
midnight. A strange race of fishermen performed the ghastly
office. The speech of the dead was distinctly heard by the
boatmen, their weight made the keel sink deep in the water; but
their forms were invisible to mortal eye. Such were the marvels
which an able historian, the contemporary of Belisarius, of
Simplicius, and of Tribonian, gravely related in the rich and
polite Constantinople, touching the country in which the founder