small extent, yet of a certain self-sufficing completeness. Many of the present shires correspond to the old kingdoms, and bear their names to this day. The bishops' sees often coincide with the seats of royalty; for the kings wished each to have a bishop to himself in his little territory, since they had to endow the bishopric. How many regulations still in force date from these times! The Anglo-Saxons always had an immediate and near relation to the kingdom of the Franks. It was with the daughter of a Frankish prince that the first impulse towards conversion came into a Saxon royal house. By the Anglo-Saxons again the conversion of inner Germany was carried out, in opposition to the same Scoto-Irish element which they withstood in Britain. Carl the Great thought it expedient to inform the Mercian King Offa of the progress of Christianity among the Saxons in Germany: he looked on him as his natural ally. Both kingdoms had moreover a common interest as against the free British populations on their western marches, who were allied with each other across the sea: decisive campaigns of Carl the Great and King Egbert of Wessex coincide in point of time, and may have supported each other. Similarly, we may suppose that Egbert, who lived a number of years as an exile at Carl's court, and could not have remained uninfluenced by his mode of government and improved military tactics, was then also incited and enabled, after his return, to subdue the little kingdoms and unite them with Wessex: by the side of the 'Francia' of the continent he created in the island a united 'Anglia.' But still there subsisted a yet greater difference. Sprung from the stock of Cerdic, Egbert belonged to the popular royalty which we find throughout at the head of the invading Germans; he is, so far, more like the Merovingians whom Carl's predecessors overthrew, than like Carl himself; and he was almost entirely destitute of that strong groundwork of military institutions on which the Carolingians supported themselves. His rise depended much more on the fact that the old families in Mercia, Northumbria, and Kent had disappeared, and the succession in general had become doubtful; after Egbert had conquered the claimants to the throne in a great and bloody battle, he was recognised by the Witans of the several kingdoms as their common prince, and his family as that which in fact it now was,--the leading one of all. After the example of Pipin's family, whose alliance with the Papacy was the most important historical event of the epoch and founded Western Christendom, the descendants of Cerdic also got themselves anointed by the popes--for the religious movement still had the predominance over every other. The amalgamation of the tribes and kingdoms found its expression in the Church, through the prestige and rank of the Archbishop of Canterbury, almost earlier than it did in the State; the unity of the Church broke down the antipathies of the