Frederick threw himself, with all the passionate ardour of his character, into the difficult task of restoring the waning glories of the Empire. For the thirty-seven years of life that remained to him, he never faltered in his task. To him Germany and Italy were but two sections of that Holy Roman Empire whose rights and dignities he strove with all his might to uphold. ‘During all his reign,’ wrote a chronicler, ‘nothing was nearer his heart than re-establishing the Empire of Rome on its ancient basis.’ To him every right that had been exercised by Justinian or Constantine, by Charlemagne or Otto the Great, was literally his right as the lawful successor of these mighty rulers. He has been very truly described as an ‘imperialist Hildebrand,’ and Hildebrand himself had not a more lofty consciousness of his high purpose and divine mission to establish God’s kingdom on earth. But he was no dreamer like Otto, ‘the wonder of the world.’ He strove to realise his lofty ideals with shrewd practical wisdom and businesslike command of details. The great jurists of Bologna, who constantly stood round his throne, not only taught him that the Emperor was lord of the world, and that the will of the prince had the force of law, but illustrated to the most minute detail the individual prerogatives of his office. His German subjects re-echoed these sentiments, and his uncle, Bishop Otto of Freising, taught that to the Emperor belonged the protection of the whole world. When bitter experience showed him that all his strength and all his faith were of little avail in setting up again a polity which the age had outlived, he had perforce to distinguish between his position as German King and Roman Emperor, and apply one method in breaking down the turbulent feudalism of his northern kingdom and another in checking the growing spirit of municipal independence in the lands beyond the Alps. In Italy his path seemed strewn with disasters, and even in Germany he obtained no very brilliant success. But if he failed, his was one of the most magnificent failures in history, a failure which did not prevent him from handing on his power almost unimpaired to his son. With all his faults, Frederick remains the noblest embodiment of mediæval kingship, the most imposing, the most heroic, and the most brilliant of the long line of German princes, who strove to realise the impracticable but glorious political ideal of the Middle Ages.