The imperial bully now bid the pope, in plain terms, stick to those things which,--as he said,--Christ was the first to perform and teach. The law of justice, said he, has restored to every one his own; and he (Frederic) will not fail to pay the full honor due to his predecessors, by preserving intact the dignity and crown which they had transmitted to him. Why he was not to require feudal oaths and service from bishops, who professed to belong simply to God, is all the more incomprehensible to him, as Christ, the great teacher of all men, freely paid taxes to Caesar for himself and Peter. By so doing, proceeds Frederic, he gave thee (Adrian) an example to follow, and a lesson of the last importance in those words: "Learn of me, for I am meek and humble of heart." From this sacrilegious irony he passes to vulgar abuse; and tells the pope that his legates had been turned out of Germany, because they were not preachers but thieves, not lovers of peace but heapers of money, not reformers of the world but insatiate seekers of gold. Did Pope Sylvester, he asks, possess any temporal lordship in Constantine's time? and did not the popes afterwards owe all their temporal power to the generosity of that prince, and the rest of Frederic's predecessors? In conclusion, he remarks that it was because he saw the monster pride seated even in the chair of Peter, that he felt moved to use the language he did. This letter was well calculated to provoke Adrian's deepest indignation; but, as he never allowed his passions to get the better of his judgment, and always knew how to curb the liveliest movements of personal wrath, when the interests of the Church were at stake, heartily tired, moreover, of the petty rubs on which the dispute between him and Frederic was by the latter ostensibly made to hinge, he bestirred himself once more to effect a reconciliation compatible with his duty and character. To this end, he sent an embassy of a more stately description than had ever represented a Pope before, composed of five cardinals, one of whom was a personal friend of Frederic, to the emperor at Bologna; whither he had arrived soon after Easter (A. D. 1159) to pass sentence on the Milanese, who, in the mean time, had again sought to shake off the German yoke. The terms which this embassy was instructed to demand as fair and equitable, were as follows: That for the future no imperial agent should exercise pretended imperial prerogatives in Rome, without the foreknowledge of the Pope; that no levies on the domains of the Church should be made by the Emperor, except when he was crowned; that the Italian bishops should not take oaths of particular, but only of general homage; that the possessions of the Roman church, and the revenues of Ferrara, Massa, Fighernola, of the Matilda inheritance, of the country between Acquapendente and Rome, of Spoleto, Sardinia, and Corsica,--all acknowledged in the middle ages as indisputable feoffs of the Holy See,--should be restored.