less in a condition to oppose that force by which they had been protected against those enemies, when turned unexpectedly upon themselves.  Hengist, with very little opposition, subdued the province of Kent, and there laid the foundation of the first Saxon kingdom.  Every battle the Britons fought only prepared them for a new defeat, by weakening their strength and displaying the inferiority of their courage.  Vortigern, instead of a steady and regular resistance, opposed a mixture of timid war and unable negotiation.  In one of their meetings, wherein the business, according to the German mode, was carried on amidst feasting and riot, Vortigern was struck with the beauty of a Saxon virgin, a kinswoman of Hengist, and entirely under his influence.  Having married her, he delivered himself over to her counsels.

[Sidenote:  A.D. 452]

His people, harassed by their enemies, betrayed by their prince, and indignant at the feeble tyranny that oppressed them, deposed him, and set his son Vortimer in his place.  But the change of the king proved no remedy for the exhausted state of the nation and the constitutional infirmity of the government.  For even if the Britons could have supported themselves against the superior abilities and efforts of Hengist, it might have added to their honor, but would have contributed little to their safety.  The news of his success had roused all Saxony.  Five great bodies of that adventurous people, under different and independent commanders, very nearly at the same time broke in upon as many different parts of the island.  They came no longer as pirates, but as invaders.  Whilst the Britons contended with one body of their fierce enemies, another gained ground, and filled with slaughter and desolation the whole country from sea to sea.  A devouring war, a dreadful famine, a plague, the most wasteful of any recorded in our history, united to consummate the ruin of Britain.  The ecclesiastical writers of that age, confounded at the view of those complicated calamities, saw nothing but the arm of God stretched out for the punishment of a sinful and disobedient nation.  And truly, when we set before us in one point of view the condition of almost all the parts which had lately composed the Western Empire,—­of Britain, of Gaul, of Italy, of Spain, of Africa,—­at once overwhelmed by a resistless inundation of most cruel barbarians, whose inhuman method of war made but a small part of the miseries with which these nations were afflicted, we are almost driven out of the circle of political inquiry:  we are in a manner compelled to acknowledge the hand of God in those immense revolutions by which at certain periods He so signally asserts His supreme dominion, and brings about that great system of change which is perhaps as necessary to the moral as it is found to be in the natural world.