no production, except slaves too illiterate for the Roman market. Imagination pictured strange things. One province was reported where “the ground was covered with serpents, and the air was such that no man could inhale it and live.”[159] In the polite circles of the Empire the whole region excited a fearful horror, which has been aptly likened to that of the early Ionians for “the Straits of Scylla and the city of the Læstrygonian cannibals.”[160] The historian records with a sigh, that “no magnificent remains of Latian porches and aqueducts are to be found” here,--that “no writer of British birth is reckoned among the masters of Latian poetry and eloquence.”[161] And this was England at the beginning. Long afterwards, when centuries had intervened, the savage was improved into the barbarian. But from one authentic instance learn the rest. The trade in slaves was active, and English peddlers bought up children throughout the country, while the people, greedy of the price, sold their own relations, sometimes their own offspring.[162] In similar barbarism, all Jews and their gains were the absolute property of the king; and this law, beginning with Edward the Confessor, was enforced under successive monarchs, one of them making a mortgage of all Jews to his brother as security for a debt.[163] Nothing worse is now said of Africa. Progress was slow. When in 1435 the Italian Æneas Sylvius, afterwards Pope Pius the Second, visited this island, it was to his eyes most forlorn. Houses in cities were in large part built without lime. Cottages had no other door than a bull-hide. Food was coarse,--sometimes, in place of bread, the bark of trees; and white bread was such a rarity among the people as to be a curiosity.[164] When afterwards, under Henry the Eighth, civilization had begun, the condition of the people was deplorable. There was no such thing among them as comfort, while plague and sweating-sickness prevailed. The learned and ingenious Erasmus, who was an honored guest in England at this time, refers much to the filthiness of the houses. The floors he describes as commonly of clay strewn with rushes, in the renewal of which those at the bottom sometimes remained undisturbed for twenty years, retaining filth unmentionable,--“_sputa, vomitus, mictum canum et hominum, projectam cervisiam et piscium reliquias, aliasque sordes non nominandas_.”[165] I quote the words of this eminent observer. The traveller from the interior of Africa would hardly make a worse report.