The truest description of the Western Empire during the thousand years from the first Charles to the last Francis is that which sounds so like a contradiction, “the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.” It remained by the strictest continuity a Roman Empire; once accept the position of the Western Emperors as against the Eastern, and no flaw can be found in the whole succession. But the Roman Empire had become a possession of the German nation; German electors chose a German king, and the German king had a right to receive his consecration as Roman Emperor without any further questions being asked. “Ex quo Romanum nostra virtute redemptum, Hostibus expulsis, ad nos justissimus ordo Transtulit imperium, Romani gloria regni Nos penes est: quemcumque sibi Germania regem Præficit, hunc dives submisso vertice Roma Suscipit, et verso Tiberim regit ordine Rhenus.” An older form of the same idea is found in the phrase which spoke of the translation of the Empire from the Greeks to the Franks. Translated to the Franks, the Empire, as concerns the West, assuredly was; and, on the Western theory, it may in a sense be said to be translated from the Greeks. A line of Emperors whose native speech was German succeeded, in Western ideas, a line of Emperors whose native speech was Greek. Yet the phrase will not stand every test. The words “Greek” and “Frank,” as used in the formula, do not exactly answer to one another. A man of the East, if he could have brought himself to allow that the Empire had been translated at all from his own side of Hadria, would have said that the formula should rather speak of a translation of the Empire from the Romans to the Franks. But no one in the West would have thought of saying that the Empire was translated from the Greeks to the Romans. We have just heard the Western Empire called, with national pride, a Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. But no national pride could have been called up by speaking of the Eastern Empire as a Holy Roman Empire of the Greek nation. For “German” was a national name in which the men of the Western Empire gloried; “Greek” was a name which no man of the Eastern Empire admitted to belong to him. It is perfectly true that the two Empires did in the end become, the one a German, the other a Greek state. But they became German and Greek in different senses and by different processes. We see at once that the Western Empire became German through the election of a German king to its crown. It seems ridiculous to speak, even for the sake of pointing the contrast, of the Eastern Empire becoming Greek by the election of a Greek king to its crown. Something like that might happen in the nineteenth century; it could not possibly happen in the ninth. We may here bring in the analogy and the contrast of which I spoke at the end of our last lecture. The nearest analogy to be found in the East to the Empire of Charles the Frank would have been if Bulgarian Simeon