afterwards adjudged his son Lothaire, unworthy of the crown, and conferred it on his brother, Charles the Bald. A subsequent council deposed him, when the pusillanimous monarch complained, "I ought not to have been deposed, or at least not before I had been judged by the bishops, who gave me royal authority: I have always submitted to their correction, and am ready to do so now." But while this kind of power was altogether inconsistent with the ministerial character, and was often most tyrannically employed, it is some little relief to know, that the history of the middle ages can supply numerous instances of the beneficial exercise of clerical influence in checking the vices of the great, and curbing the injustice of monarchs. The church, too, sometimes interposed between nobles and princes at variance with each other, and prevented the shedding of blood; of which a pleasing instance occurs in the life of Theodore, archbishop of Canterbury, in the seventh century, who, just before his death, reconciled two Saxon kings on the eve of a sanguinary conflict, and thus closed his public acts by sheathing the sword of war.[5] The bishops of Europe during the dark ages formed a civil as well as a spiritual aristocracy, controlling, to a great extent, the affairs of empires: but the bishop of one see climbed above all the rest, to the highest pinnacle of power, first obtaining a sort of limited monarchy, and then grasping at universal despotism. It comes not within the range of our present design to trace the steps by which the prelates of Rome attained their vast prerogatives; "Were they not Mighty magicians? Theirs a wondrous spell, Where true and false were with infernal art Close interwoven: where together met Blessings and curses, threats and promises: And with the terrors of futurity Mingled whate'er enchants and fascinates, Music and painting, sculpture, rhetoric, And dazzling light, and darkness visible, And architectural pomp such as none else. What in his day the Syracusan sought, Another world to plant his engines on, They had, and having it, like gods, not men, They moved this world at pleasure."[6] Several of the popes were men of political and far-seeing minds, and laid their plans in the spirit of profound statesmanship; but it is a mistake to suppose that they were all political calculators--some of them unintentionally contributed to rear the fabric of Roman despotism, and a number of circumstances, which were quite independent of pontifical control, concurred in producing the ultimate result. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries reached the zenith of its pride and power, and presented a spectacle of despotic authority unparalleled in the history of the world.