[1] "Britannia after the Romans," 62, 4to.
[2] It is a singular circumstance that our neighbours have preserved the name of our country more perfectly than we have done by our mutilated term of _England_, for they write it with antiquarian precision, _Angle-terre_--the land of the Angles. Our counties bear the vestiges of these Saxons expelling or exterminating the native Britons, as our pious Camden ejaculates, "by God's wonderful providence."
[3] The diligent investigator of the history of our Anglo-Saxons concludes that this unauthorised tale of the coronation and the decree of Egbert is unworthy of credence.
Camden, in his first edition, had fixed the date of the change of the name as occurring in the year 810; in his second edition he corrected it to 800. Holinshed says _about_ 800. Speed gives a much later date, 819. It is evident that these disagreeing dates are all hazarded conjectures.
[4] Mitford's "Harmony of Language," 429. I might have placed this possible circumstance in the article "A History of Events which have not happened," in "Curiosities of Literature."
[5] Sir GARDNER WILKINSON, in the curious volume of his recondite discoveries in the land of the Pyramids.
[6] "History of the World," 167, fol. 1666. We have also a curious account of the ancient manner of naming persons and places among our own nation in venerable Lambarde's "Perambulations of Kent," 349, 453.
The history and literature of England are involved in the transactions of a people who, living in such remote times at the highest of their fortunes, never advanced beyond a semi-civilization. But political freedom was the hardy and jealous offspring nursed in the forests of Germany; there was first heard the proclamation of equal laws, and there a people first assumed the name of Franks or Freemen. Our language, and our laws, and our customs, originate with our Teutonic ancestors; among them we are to look for the trunk, if not the branches, of our national establishments. In the rude antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon church, our theoretical inquirers in ecclesiastical history trace purer doctrines and a more primitive discipline; and in the shadowy Witenagemot, the moveable elements of the British constitution: the language and literature of England still lie under their influence, for this people everywhere left the impression of a strong hand.