Meanwhile the Pope has persuaded the Lombard king Rachis to go into a monastery. Astulf seizes the crown, and attacks Ravenna. The Pope succeeding, Stephen III., opposes him; and he marches on Rome, threatening to assault it, unless the citizens redeem their lives by a poll-tax. Stephen determines to go himself to Pepin to ask for help: and so awful has the name and person of a Pope become, that he is allowed to do it; allowed to pass safely and unarmed through the very land upon which he is going to let loose all the horrors of invading warfare. It is a strange, and instructive figure, that. The dread of the unseen, the fear of spiritual power, has fallen on the wild Teutons; on Frank and on Lombard alike. The Pope and his clergy are to them magicians, against whom neither sword nor lance avails; who can heal the sick and blast the sound; who can call to their aid out of the clouds that pantheon of demi- gods, with which, under the name of saints, they have peopled heaven; who can let loose on them the legions of fiends who dwell in every cave, every forest, every ruin, every cloud; who can, by the sentence of excommunication, destroy both body and soul in hell. They were very loth to fear God, these wild Teutons; therefore they had instead, as all men have who will not fear God, to fear the devil. So Pope Stephen goes to Pepin, the eldest son of the Church. He promises to come with all his Franks. Stephen's conscience seems to have been touched: he tries to have no fighting, only negotiation: but it is too late now. Astolf will hear of no terms; Pepin sweeps over the Alps, and at the gates of Pavia dictates his own terms to the Lombards. The old Lombard spirit seems to have past away. Pepin goes back again, and Astolf refuses to fulfil his promises. The Pope sends Pepin that letter from St. Peter himself with which this lecture commenced. Astolf has marched down, as we heard, to the walls of Rome, laying the land waste; cutting down the vines, carrying off consecrated vessels, insulting the sacrament of the altar. The Lombards have violated nuns; and tried to kill them, the Pope says; though, if they had really tried, one cannot see why they should not have succeeded. In fact, Pope Stephen's hysterical orations to Pepin must be received with extreme caution. No Catholic historian of that age cares to examine the truth of a fact which makes for him; nothing is too bad to say of an enemy: and really the man who would forge a letter from St. Peter might dare to tell a few lesser falsehoods into the bargain. Pepin cannot but obey so august a summons; and again he is in Italy, and the Lombards dare not resist him. He seizes not only all that Astolf had taken from the Pope, but the Pentapolis and Exarchate, the property, if of any one, of the Greek Emperors, and bestows them on Stephen, the Pope, and 'the holy Roman Republic.'