Nor is that as remarkable as it might superficially appear, since, within a very few decades of the Battle of Hastings, the same absorptive process that had been so characteristic a reaction of these islands to their previous conquerors was again in full swing. Even the Romans, although in Gaul and Spain they had succeeded in replacing the original dialects with their own stately language, had never succeeded in Latinizing Britain to any appreciable extent; and, while it is true that many Roman contributions remain as permanent features of our laws and customs, their four hundred years' sojourn left a scarcely perceptible impress upon the tongue of the supposedly defeated. Just as in Roman times, too, there was a considerable and real mingling, both in municipal life and in actual marriage, between the original inhabitants and the Roman colonists, so, in Saxon times, we find a similar process always at work in varying degrees, and indeed officially encouraged by several of the most far-sighted of the Anglo-Saxon kings and administrators. A similar absorptive phenomenon became observable in the later relations of Saxon and Dane; and, with the loss of Normandy, in the reign of King John, and the common cause then made between the French-derived barons and the English hitherto so despised by them, the world was to hear in Magna Charta the first authentic word of the England that we know to-day. Nor was this process, unique though it was, as far {xxi} as recorded history can inform us, altogether inexplicable when the position of Great Britain and its succeeding invaders is considered. To each group of these, in the then world, it was an _Ultima Thule_. Beyond it, as far as they knew, there was no other--it was the verge of all things. To each its occupation had been an adventure, presumably undertaken by the most daring of the represented race. Each was at bay there to those that followed and of a spirit and fibre that could not easily be obliterated; and, in each, despite the ferocity of the times, was the respect of brave men for each other. Centuries later, on the other side of the Atlantic, similar conditions were to come into being; and it may well be that, in the larger island of America, we are witnessing a similar process on an extended scale. But America was then in the womb of time, though it is a curious and significant fact that its discovery largely coincided with that great renaissance of the sea-instinct of England, embodied in the persons of the Elizabethan sailors. Up to then, the English national purview had been almost wholly insular and focussed on the Continent. The Anglo-Continental dreams of the Norman and Plantagenet kings had scarcely died; and they had died hard. The loss of Calais, perhaps the culminating factor in bringing about the new vision so soon to dawn, had seemed, at the time, nothing but a disgrace and a disaster, and far from the beginning of a greater epoch.