We may then, I think, fix, with some confidence, the year 1204 as the time when the true Roman Empire of the East came to an end. The various Greek powers continue it, but they continue it only as fragments; none of them can claim to be the very thing itself, however cut short. But they are genuine fragments; if not the very thing itself, they are pieces of it. In the East Ῥωμαῖοι had become the name of a nation, distinct and easily recognized, if artificial, and Trebizond and Epeiros, no less than Constantinople, sheltered fragments of that divided nation. The Western Empire in its later, its purely German, shape, does not in the same way continue the national existence of any people that could be called even artificial Romans. It continues Roman titles and memories; as so doing, it is a true survival of the Roman power, but it has passed away from all Roman national life to become no small element in the national life of another people. It became the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, and the German nation felt itself lifted up by having the Holy Roman Empire in its keeping. After 1250 we begin to feel that there is something incongruous even in the Imperial coronation. The personal dignity of Henry of Luxemburg veils the fact that even he was not like the Franks and the Swabians; Lewis of Bavaria is rather the great subject of Imperial theories than a doer of any Imperial deeds. We come to Charles the Fourth and Frederick the Third; the crowning of Charles at Rome may be bracketted with his crowning at Arles, and Frederick will call forth a smile on the most Ghibelin of lips, as we see him in cope and crown, Augustus and _Pater Patriæ_ and something like _Pontifex_ as well, in that strange gathering of men of all ages which keeps watch over his penniless son at Innsbrück. On the other hand, if the Eastern survivals, unlike the Western, kept on a national being which might in some sort be called Roman, the Western, the German, shadow of Empire had the advantage of unity. It was one survival and not many. There is no formal break between 800 and 1806. The difference is the difference between a thing which is utterly broken in pieces, but of which each fragment keeps, so far as a fragment can, the character of the whole, and a thing which lives on, which never loses its personality, which is never broken in pieces, but which so changes its character that to speak of it as the same thing, though technically accurate, strikes us as no longer expressing the real facts. In many points there is a wider difference between the Empire of the first Cæsars and the Empire of the Hohenstaufen than there is between the Empire of the Hohenstaufen and the Empire of the Austrians and Lorrainers. But the Hohenstaufen Emperors still felt as Emperors and acted as Emperors; whether their objects were wise or foolish, possible or impossible, they were still Imperial objects, objects that reached far beyond the bounds of Swabia or of Germany.