Ir was in the middle of the fifth century that Hengist and Horsa, with their band of sturdy Saxons, first landed on the shores of Britain, and how vast the change they have effected in her destiny! The fathers of the English race, they infused a new and Saxon energy into the stagnant life-blood of the native Briton, and gave once more to the effeminate slave the erect posture and manly bearing of the freeman.* They drove back the Scot to his mountain fastnesses, and after struggling through the disorders of the Heptarchy, they founded that kingdom which still honors their memory by the proud name of England. They brought with them from their home in the North the great principles of civil freedom, and having sown them on British soil, they bequeathed them to their descendants, to produce for coming generations the rich harvest of English liberty. They planted the acorn, and, behold, their children sit beneath the shadow of the British oak! The statutes of the great King Alfred are still the basis of the common law of England,-the common law, which, like the element of water, keeps alive every green thing in the world of social happiness, and makes the wilderness of society to bud and blossom as the rose. The Township system of his day is to this hour the glory of our own New England, and, according to that high authority, De Tocqueville, constitutes the very corner-stone of "Democracy in America."

Those subsequent invaders, the Danes and Normans, sprung from the same original stock, and in love with the same free, unfettered life, introduced in their train like principles and similar institutions. The

* History informs us, that the immediate result of the Saxon invasion was to reduce the Britons to a still deeper degradation; but as the two nations became amalgamated to form the English race, its ultimate effect was, as we have said, to infuse the Saxon spirit into the natives of the soil, and to form all we so well admire in the Anglo-Saxon character.