I drew a distinction in my last lecture between two stages in the dying out of the Roman power and its traditions. There were times when the two Empires of East and West, however changed their character from what it had been in earlier times, however far they had gone, the one to become Greek, the other to become German, might still be held to keep the essence of their old Roman being. And there were later times when the names and traditions of Rome still lingered on, but when they could not be looked on as more than shadows and survivals. I wish it of course to be understood that this division between these times is an arbitrary line of my own drawing. In the West at least it does not answer to any such marked epoch as the event of 800, the event of 1453, the event of 1806. I drew the line at the death of Frederick the Second. We shall, I think, all allow that, if Frederick the Second represents a state of things which had become very unlike the state of things under Trajan or even under Constantine, Francis the Second represents a state of things at least as unlike the state of things under Frederick. But it does not follow that, if a line is to be drawn, every one would draw it at the death of Frederick. It might be said that the Empire had become a mere German state before his day, that the position of Frederick was exceptional, that his importance in Italian affairs really belonged to the King of Sicily and not to the Emperor of the Romans, that the career even of his grandfather showed that in his time the Roman claims of the German kings had become thoroughly unreal, and rested wholly on the strength of their German armies. Another might draw the line much later; he might say that the true Empire passed away when an Emperor, a third Frederick most unlike the First and Second, took his crown for the last time before the altar of old Saint Peter’s. He might draw it when that Frederick’s son took an Imperial style, though to be sure with a qualifying adjective, without any show of Imperial crowning. Or he might draw it when the last _Imperator_, successor of the first _Imperator electus_, took the crown of the Empire, not before the altar of Saint Peter at Rome, but before the altar of Saint Petronius at Bologna. The last is indeed an epoch-making moment; Charles the Fifth does seem to wind up with some fitting dignity that Imperial line which began with Charles the Great. And as the last Emperor, as distinguished from Emperors-elect, he does truly wind it up. The gap between Charles and Ferdinand is in truth a wide one. But surely there is a still wider gap between Frederick the Wonder of the World and princes like William of Holland, Richard of Cornwall, and even, when looked on from the Imperial side, as Rudolf of Habsburg. Rudolf is indeed different from William and Richard; he is great and famous as German King; but the line of Emperors knows him not. The fact that the man whom we may