real part in the government of his own country, and if he wished to become a soldier, he was sent away from Britain to serve with a legion stationed in some far-distant part of the empire. Thus it came about that when, in the fifth century, the Romans withdrew from Britain to defend Rome itself from invading hordes of savages, the unhappy Britons had forgotten how to govern and how to defend themselves, and fell an easy prey to the many enemies waiting to pounce on their defenceless country. Picts from Scotland invaded the north, and Scots from Ireland plundered the west; worst of all, the heathen Angles and Saxons, pouring across the seas from their homes in the Elbe country, wasted the land with fire and sword. Many of the Britons were slain; those who escaped sought refuge in the mountainous parts of the west from Cornwall to the Firth of Clyde. There, forgetting, to some extent, their quarrels, they took the name of the Cymry, which means the "Brethren," though the English, unable to understand their language, spoke of them contemptuously as the "Welsh," or the "Strangers."

   For a long time the struggle went on between the two races, and nowhere mere fiercely than in the south-west, where the invaders set up the Kingdom of Wessex; but at last there arose among the Britons a great chieftain called Arthur. The old histories speak of him as "Emperor," and he seems to have been obeyed by all the Britons; perhaps, therefore, he had succeeded to the position of the Roman official known as the Comes Britanniæ, whose duty it was to hasten to the aid of the local governors in defending any part of Britain where danger threatened. At all events, under his leadership, the oppressed people defeated the Saxons in a desperate fight at Mons Badonicus, perhaps the little place in Dorsetshire known as Badbury, or, it may be, Bath itself, which is still called Badon by the Welsh. After that victory, history has little to say about Arthur. The stories tell that he was killed in a great battle in the west; but, nowadays, the wisest historians think it more probable that he met his death in a conflict near the River Forth.

   And so, in history, Arthur, the hero of such a mass of romantic story, is little more than a name, and it is hardly possible to explain how he attained to such renown as the hero of marvellous and, sometimes, magical feats, unless on the supposition that he became confused with some legendary hero, half god, half man, whose fame he added to his own. Perhaps not the least marvel about him is that he who was the hero of the Britons, should have become the national hero of the English race that he spent his life in fighting. Yet that is what did 

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