' The name of their nation being mentioned to be
Angles, his ear caught the verbal coincidence--the benevolent wish for
their improvement darted into his mind, and he expressed his own
feelings, and excited those of his auditors, by remarking--'It suits
them well: they have angel faces, and ought to be the co-heirs of the
angels in heaven.'
"The different classes of society among the Anglo-Saxons were such as
belonged to birth, office, or property, and such as were occupied by
a freeman, a freedman, or one of the servile description. It is to be
lamented in the review of these different classes, that a large proportion
of the Anglo-Saxon population was in a state of abject slavery: they
were bought and sold with land, and were conveyed in the grants of it
promiscuously with the cattle and other property upon it; and in the
Anglo-Saxon wills, these wretched beings were given away precisely as
we now dispose of our plate, our furniture, or our money. At length the
custom of manumission, and the diffusion of Christianity, ameliorated
the condition of the Anglo-Saxon slaves.
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