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cleared by the Phœnician discoveries and finally dispelled by the arms of Cæsar, again settled on the shores of the Atlantic, and a Roman province was again lost among the fabulous islands of the Ocean. One hundred and fifty years after the reign of Honorius, the gravest historian of the times[1] describes the wonders of a remote isle, whose eastern and western parts are divided by an antique wall, the boundary of life and death, or, more properly, of truth and fiction. The east is a fair country, inhabited by a civilized people: the air is healthy, the waters are pure and plentiful, and the earth yields her regular and fruitful increase. In the west, beyond the wall, the air is infectious and mortal; the ground is covered with serpents; and this dreary solitude is the region of departed spirits, who are transported from the opposite shores in substantial boats, and by living rowers. Some families of fishermen, the subjects of the Franks, are excused from tribute, in consideration of the mysterious office which is performed by these Charons of the ocean. Each in his turn is summoned at the hour of midnight, to hear the voices, and even the names, of the ghosts; he is sensible of their weight, and he feels himself impelled by an unknown, but irresistible, power. After this dream of fancy we read with astonishment, that the name of this island is Brittia; that it lies in the ocean, against the mouth of the Rhine, and less than thirty miles from the continent; that it is possessed by three nations, the Frisians, the Angles, and the Britons; and that some Angles had appeared at Constantinople, in the train of the French ambassadors. From these ambassadors Procopius might be informed of a singular, though an improbable, adventure, which announces the spirit, rather than the delicacy, of an English heroine. She had been betrothed to Radiger king of the Varni, a tribe of Germans who touched the ocean and the Rhine; but the perfidious lover was tempted by motives of policy to prefer his father's widow, the sister of Theodebert king of the Franks.[2] The forsaken princess of the Angles, instead
- ↑ See Procopius de Bell. Gothic, l. iv. c. 20, p. 620-625. The Greek historian is himself so confounded by the wonders which he relates, that he weakly attempts to distinguish the islands of Brittia and Britain, which he has identified by so many inseparable circumstances. [His Brittia is certainly Britain. His Brettania, which he fancied to be an island also, is Brittany. (Perhaps there was some confusion with Ireland. Cp. Zeuss, Die Deutsehen und die Nachbarstämme, p. 362.)]
- ↑ Theodebert, grandson of Clovis, and king of Austrasia, was the most powerful and warlike prince of the age; and this remarkable adventure may be placed between the years 534 and 547, the extreme terms of his reign. His sister Theudechildis retired to Sens, where she founded monasteries, and distributed alms (see
