With the Britons whom Cæsar conquered, though they occupied the surface of our soil, we have, nationally speaking, no concern; but when the white horse of Hengist, after many a long and desperate struggle, floated in triumph or in peace from the Tamar to the Tweed, our existence as a nation, the period to which we may refer the origin of English habits, language, and institutions, undoubtedly begins. So, when the Franks established themselves west of the Rhine, the French nation may be said to have come into being. True, the Saxons yielded to the discipline and valour of a foreign race; true, the barbarous hordes of the Elbe and the Saal were not the ancestors, as any one who travels in the south of France can hardly fail to see, of the majority of the present nation of the French: but the Normans and Saxons sprang from the same stock, and the changes worked by Clovis and his warriors were so vast and durable, (though, in comparison with their conquered vassals, they were numerically few,) that with the invasion of Hengist in the one case, and the battle of Poictiers in the other, the modern history of both countries may not improperly be said to have begun. To the student of that history, however, one consideration must occur, which imparts to the objects of his studies an interest emphatically its own. It is this: he has strong reason to believe that all the elements of society are before him. It may indeed be true that Providence has reserved some yet unknown tribe, wandering on the banks of the Amour or of the Amazons, as the instrument of accomplishing some mighty purpose--humanly speaking, however, such an event is most improbable. To adopt such an hypothesis, would be in direct opposition to all the analogies by which, in the absence of clearer or more precise motives, human infirmity must be guided. The map of the world is spread out before us; there are no regions which we speak of in the terms of doubt and ignorance that the wisest Romans applied to the countries beyond the Vistula and the Rhine, when in Lord Bacon's words "the world was altogether home-bred." When Cicero jested with Trebatius on the little importance of a Roman jurist among hordes of Celtic barbarians, he little thought that from that despised country would arise a nation, before the blaze of whose conquests the splendour of Roman Empire would grow pale; a nation which would carry the art of government and the enjoyment of freedom to a perfection, the idea of which, had it been presented to the illustrious orator, stored as his mind was with all the lore of Grecian sages, and with whatever knowledge the history of his own country could supply, would have been consigned by him, with the glorious visions of his own Academy, to the shady spaces of an ideal world. Had he, while bewailing the loss of that freedom which he would not survive, disfigured as it was by popular tumult and patrician insolence--had he been told that a figure far more faultless was one day to arise amid the unknown forests and marshes of Britain, and to be protected by the rude hands of her barbarous inhabitants till it reached the full maturity of immortal loveliness--the eloquence of Cicero himself would have been silenced, and, whatever might have been the exultation of the philosopher, the pride of the Roman would have died within him. But we can anticipate no similar revolution. The nations by which the world is inhabited are known to us; the regions which they occupy are limited; there are no fresh combinations to count upon, no reserves upon which we can depend;--there is every reason to suppose that, in the great conflict with physical and moral evil, which it is the destiny of man to wage, the last battalion is in the field.