of Roman culture in its later form.  The Latin language and the Mediterranean arts once more took their place in Britain.  The Romanising prelates,—­Wilfrith, Theodore, Dunstan,—­were also the leaders of civilisation in their own times.  The Norman Conquest brought England into yet closer connection with the Continent; and Roman law and Roman arts still more deeply affected our native culture.  Norman artificers supplanted the rude English handicraftsmen in many cases, and became a dominant class in towns.  The old English literature, and especially the old English poetry, died utterly out with Piers Plowman; while a new literature, based upon Romance models, took its origin with Chaucer and the other Court poets.  Celtic-Latin rhyme ousted the genuine Teutonic alliteration.  With the Renaissance, the triumph of the southern culture was complete.  Greek philosophy and Greek science formed the starting-point for our modern developments.  The ecclesiastical revolt from papal Rome was accompanied by a literary and artistic return to the models of pagan Rome.  The Renaissance was, in fact, the throwing off of all that was Teutonic and mediaeval, the resumption of progressive thought and scientific knowledge, at the point where it had been interrupted by the Germanic inroads of the fifth century.  The unjaded vigour of the German races, indeed, counted for much; and Europe took up the lost thread of the dying empire with a youthful freshness very different from the effete listlessness of the Mediterranean culture in its last stage.  Yet it is none the less true that our whole civilisation is even now the carrying out and completion of the Greek and Roman culture in new fields and with fresh intellects.  We owe little here to the Anglo-Saxon; we owe everything to the great stream of western culture, which began in Egypt and Assyria, permeated Greece and the Archipelago, spread to Italy and the Roman empire, and, finally, now embraces the whole European and American world.  The Teutonic intellect and the Teutonic character have largely modified the spirit of the Mediterranean civilisation; but the tools, the instruments, the processes themselves, are all legacies from a different race.  Englishmen did not invent letters, money, metallurgy, glass, architecture, and science; they received them all ready-made, from Italy and the AEgean, or more remotely still from the Euphrates and the Nile.  Nor is it necessary to add that in religion we have no debt to the Anglo-Saxon, our existing creed being entirely derived through Rome from the Semitic race.

In institutions, once more, the Anglo-Saxon has contributed almost everything.  Our political government, our limited monarchy, our parliament, our shires, our hundreds, our townships, are considered by the dominant school of historians to be all Anglo-Saxon in origin.  Our jury is derived from an Anglo-Saxon custom; our nobility and officials are representatives of Anglo-Saxon earls and reeves.  The Teuton, when