Merovingian dynasty, makes seemingly little difference in their conduct, so that their profession of it remains a scandal to Christianity to this day; and yet it lives, in the true hearts among them, down from St. Clotilde to her great grand-daughter Bertha, who in becoming Queen of Kent, builds under its chalk downs her own little chapel to St. Martin, and is the first effectively and permanently useful missionary to the Saxons, the beginner of English Erudition,—the first laid corner stone of beautiful English character.
I think henceforward you will find the memorandum of dates which I have here set down for my own guidance more simply useful than those confused by record of unimportant persons and inconsequent events, which form the indices of common history.
From the year of the Saxon invasion 449, there are exactly 400 years to the birth of Alfred, 849. You have no difficulty in remembering those cardinal years. Then, you have Four great men and great events to remember, at the close of the fifth century. Clovis, and the founding of Frank Kingdom; Theodoric and the founding of the Gothic Kingdom; Justinian and the founding of Civil law; St. Benedict and the founding of Religious law.
Of Justinian, and his work, I am not able myself to form any opinion—and it is, I think, unnecessary for students of history to form any, until they are able to estimate clearly the benefits, and mischief, of the civil
