How completely such a change would for the time blot out a distant colony from the map of the civilised world may be readily conceived; and when she again emerged in the form of a political state, containing once more the elements of civilisation and of a common interest with the rest of the world, the intermediate period of confused and uncertain knowledge would appear almost analogous to that dark age of barbarian life which precedes the birth of infant states, and on which the dim light of tradition and the lays of a rude people engaged in internecine war alone throw an uncertain ray. So it was with Britain. Deserted almost entirely by the Continental historians, and deprived of the clue which any connection with European events would afford, we are left for the history of this interval to the uncertain guide of tradition; and although it necessarily fails in affording us the means of obtaining a connected and trustworthy history, yet by discriminating between what is tradition or fable and what may fairly be accepted as history, and by combining the indications which traditional accounts derived from different sources afford, with the scattered notices contained in writings contemporary, or nearly so, with the events, we may yet be able to present the salient features of the history of this period with some confidence in their reality, and in something like chronological order. These sources of information, uncertain as they are, and faint as is the light which they throw upon the history of the country during this interval, yet reveal very distinctly indications that to the rule of the Romans in the island there succeeded a fierce and protracted struggle between the provincial Britons and the various barbarian tribes, to whose assaults they had been exposed for so many years, till it terminated in the settlement of the latter in the country, and the formation of four kingdoms, embracing these several races within definite limits. They tell us also something of those races, and of their character and relation to each other. The contest which succeeded the departure of the Romans was one not merely for the possession of the Roman territory, but for the succession to her dominion in the island. The competing parties consisted, on the one hand, of the provincial Britons who had just emerged from under the Roman rule; and, on the other, of those independent tribes, partly inhabitants of the island and partly piratical adventurers from other regions, who had so frequently ravaged the Roman province, and now endeavoured to snatch the prize from the provincial Britons, and from each other. [Sidenote: The four races in Britain.] The races engaged in this struggle were four—the Britons, the Picts, the Scots, and the Saxons or Angles.[108] The two former were indigenous, the two latter foreign settlers. [Sidenote: The Britons.]