judicial, domestic, all at this period more or less clogged with pretended relations to the spiritual power; general interests, local disputes, quarrels of individuals, all was referred as a ‘dernier resort’, sometimes in both first and last instance, to the Vicar of Jesus Christ; and the Court of Rome obtained that influence in detail, if we may so term it, of all the most tremendous, precisely for this reason, that each of its consequences, isolated from the rest, appeared the more unimportant. Isidore and Gratian have transformed the pope into a universal administrator. Frederick Barbarossa was then the principal obstacle to the progress of pontifical power. Young, ambitious and enterprising, he was connected, by the ties of blood, with the families of Guelph and Ghibeline. He seemed destined to extinguish, or at least to suspend, the fury of the two factions. He announced the design of confirming in Italy the imperial power; and it could not have been anticipated, that a new crusade should divert him as speedily from it, after the misfortunes attendant on that of 1147. In the mean time, Adrian IV. born in a village in the neighbourhood of the abbey of St. Alban, mounted the chair of St. Peter in the month of December 1154.¹⁸⁶ The king of England, Henry II. congratulated himself on seeing an Englishman at the head of the Church, and asked his permission to take possession of Ireland, in order to establish Christianity there in its primitive purity. Adrian consented to it, with this observation, that all the isles, in which the Christian faith had been preached, belonged indubitably to the Holy See, even as Henry himself acknowledged. The pope, then, did consent to dispose of Ireland in favour of the king of England, on condition that the king should cause the Roman church to be paid an annual tax of one penny out of each house in Ireland. Fleury¹⁸⁷ supposes that John of Salisbury was one of the ambassadors sent by the king to the pontiff to solicit Ireland from him; but Matthew Paris¹⁸⁸ names the deputies without mentioning John of Salisbury; however, the latter might have been commissioned to second the application to Adrian, whose intimate friend he was.—They passed three months together at Beneventum. There it was that Adrian, having asked John what they said of the Roman Church, was answered, that she passed for the step-mother rather than the mother of other churches, that the Pope himself was a great expense to the world, and that so many violences, so much avarice, and so much pride disgusted Christendom. Is that, said the pope, your own opinion of the matter? “I am really puzzled,” replied John; “but since the Cardinal Guy Clement joins the public on this point, I cannot be of a different sentiment. You are most Holy Father out of the right way; wherefore exact of your children such enormous tributes? and that which you have received freely, why not freely bestow it¹⁸⁹ ?” The pope, says Fleury,¹⁹⁰ began to laugh, and to