which fell to the lot of the “effete” “Greek of the Lower Empire;” he might well deem that he had work enough to do in the lands which naturally looked up to the New Rome, and that he might leave the Old to set up again for itself, if such was its own good pleasure. Set up for itself it did, as we have already seen; but it set up for itself mainly to deck a German king and a German kingdom with its own Roman memories. Charles, like Theodoric, had called into being a system which it needed himself to work. He could be at once German King and Roman Cæsar in deed as well as in name. His immediate successors found it hard to be either. By the end of the ninth century the great Frankish dominion was broken in pieces; the crown of the Western Rome passed, now to a prince of Italy, now to a prince of Germany, now to a prince of Gaul. Under the second Lewis Italy came nearer to forming an united and separate realm than she did at any other moment between Theodoric and Victor Emmanuel. For that moment there seemed a chance--that is, we, a thousand years after the time, see that there was a chance--that there might be, not a German, but an Italian Empire of the Western Rome, to match the Greek Empire of the Eastern Rome. But it was fated that the traditions of the Western Rome should neither abide in Italy with Lewis and Berengar nor pass into Gaul with Charles the Bald. The German King, the Saxon King, the first of the Ottos, came down to receive the crown of Rome as a deliverer, to pass it on to a grandson who seemed for a moment to have the mission, not only of reviving the Roman power, but of making the elder Rome herself once more the local seat of Imperial dominion. Vivo Ottone tertio, Salus fuit populo. But the “mirabilia mundi” passed to an early grave; the true work of his house was, not to restore the local power of Rome, but to fix that the Western Empire of Rome, the now Holy Roman Empire, should be, down to the moment of its last shadowy being, a Roman Empire of the German nation. It is that Empire, the Empire of the Ottos, the Henries, and the Fredericks, the Empire to whose worthiest chief men could pay their tribute of renewed Saturnian song; Princeps terræ principum, Cæsar noster, ave, Cujus jugum omnibus bonis est suave;