was, before the last century or two, wholly foreign to art as well as to metaphysics. The converse and the parallel of the fashion of calling mediæval offices by Roman names, and supposing them therefore the same, is to be found in those old German pictures of the siege of Carthage or the battle between Porus and Alexander, where in the foreground two armies of knights, mailed and mounted, are charging each other like Crusaders, lance, in rest, while behind, through the smoke of cannon, loom out the Gothic spires and towers of the beleaguered city. And thus, when we remember that the notion of progress and development, and of change as the necessary condition thereof, was unwelcome or unknown in mediæval times, we may better understand, though we do not cease to wonder, how men, never doubting that the political system of antiquity had descended to them, modified indeed, yet in substance the same, should have believed that the Frank, the Saxon, and the Swabian ruled all Europe by a right which seems to us not less fantastic than that fabled charter whereby Alexander the Great[307] bequeathed his empire to the Slavic race for the love of Roxolana. It is a part of that perpetual contradiction of which the history of the Middle Ages is full, that this belief had hardly any influence on practical politics. The more abjectly helpless the Emperor becomes, so much the more sonorous is the language in which the dignity of his crown is described. His power, we are told, is eternal, the provinces having resumed their allegiance after the barbarian irruptions[308]; it is incapable of diminution or injury: exemptions and grants by him, so far as they tend to limit his own prerogative, are invalid[309]: all Christendom is still of right subject to him, though it may contumaciously refuse obedience[310]. The sovereigns of Europe are solemnly warned that they are resisting the power ordained of God[311]. No laws can bind the Emperor, though he may choose to live according to them: no court can judge him, though he may condescend to be sued in his own: none may presume to arraign the conduct or question the motives of him who is answerable only to God[312]. So writes Æneas Sylvius, while Frederick the Third, chased from his capital by the Hungarians, is wandering from convent to convent, an imperial beggar; while the princes, whom his subserviency to the Pope has driven into rebellion, are offering the imperial crown to Podiebrad the Bohemian king. [Sidenote: Henry VII, A.D. 1308-1313.] [Sidenote: Death of Henry VII.]