What instruction or entertainment can it give the reader, to hear a long bead-roll of barbarous names, Egric, Annas, Ethelbert, Ethelwald, Aldulf, Elfwald, Beorne, Ethelred, Ethelbert, who successively murdered, expelled, or inherited from each other, and obscurely filled the throne of that kingdom?
Ethelbert, the last of these princes, was treacherously murdered by Offa, king of Mercia, in the year 792, and his state was thenceforth [*mited] with that of Offa, as we shall relate presently.
THE KINGDOM OF MERCIA Mercia, the largest, if not the most powerful, kingdom of the Heptarchy, comprehended all the middle counties of England; and as its frontiers extended to those of all the other kingdoms, as well as to Wales, it received its name from that circumstance.

Wibba, the son of Crida, founder of the monarchy, being placed on the throne by Ethelbert, king of Kent, governed his paternal dominions by a precarious authority; and after his death, Ceorl, his kinsman, was, by the influence of the Kentish monarch, preferred to his son Penda, whose turbulent character appeared dangerous to that prince.

Penda was thus fifty years of age before he mounted the throne; and his temerity and restless disposition were found nowise abated by time, experience, or reflection.

He engaged in continual hostilities against all the neighboring states; and, by his injustice and violence, rendered himself equally odious to his own subjects and to strangers.

Sigebert, Egric, and Annas, three kings of East Anglia, perished successively in battle against him; as did also Edwin and Oswald, the two greatest princes that had reigned over Northumberland.