and races.

But the progress was very slow; and the first civilizers of the fen
were men who had nothing less in their minds than to conquer nature,
or call together round them communities of men. Hermits, driven by
that passion for isolated independence which is the mark of the
Teutonic mind, fled into the wilderness, where they might, if
possible, be alone with God and their own souls. Like St. Guthlac of
Crowland, after wild fighting for five-and-twenty years, they longed
for peace and solitude; and from their longing, carried out with that
iron will which marked the mediaeval man for good or for evil, sprang
a civilization of which they never dreamed.

Those who wish to understand the old fen life, should read Ingulf's
'History of Crowland' (Mr. Bohn has published a good and cheap
translation), and initiate themselves into a state of society, a form
of thought, so utterly different from our own, that we seem to be
reading of the inhabitants of another planet. Most amusing and most
human is old Ingulf and his continuator, 'Peter of Blois;' and though
their facts are not to be depended on as having actually happened,
they are still instructive, as showing what might, or ought to have
happened, in the opinion of the men of old.

Even more naive is the Anglo-Saxon life of St. Guthlac, written
possibly as early as the eighth century, and literally translated by
Mr. Goodwin, of Cambridge.

There we may read how the young warrior-noble, Guthlac ('The Battle-
Play,' the 'Sport of War'), tired of slaying and sinning, bethought
him to fulfil the prodigies seen at his birth; how he wandered into