pected Mohammedan, he was the object | in whose style the Imperial titles do not of all sorts of absurd and self-contradic- seem a mockery; he was the last under tory charges; but the charges mark real whose rule the three Imperial kingdoms features in the character of the man. He retained any practical connection with was something unlike any other Emperor one another, and with the ancient capior any other man; whatever professions tal of all. Frederick, who sent his of orthodoxy he might make, men felt trophies to Rome to be guarded by his instinctively that his belief and his prac- own subjects in his own city, was a Rotice were not the same as the belief and man Cæsar in a sense in which no other the practice of other Christian men. Emperor was after him. And he was There can be no doubt that he had quite not only the last Emperor of the whole emancipated his mind from the trammels Empire; he might almost be called the of his own time, and that he had theories last King of its several Kingdoms. After and designs which, to most of his con- his time Burgundy vanishes as a kingtemporaries, would have seemed mon- dom; there is hardly an event to remind strous, unintelligible, impossible. Fred- us of its existence except the fancy of erick in short was, in some obvious re- Charles the Fourth, of all possible Emspects, a man of the stamp of those who perors, to go and take the Burgundian influence their own age and the ages crown at Arles. Italy, too, after Fredwhich come after them; the men who, if erick, vanishes as a kingdom; any later their lot is cast in one walk, found sects, exercise of the royal authority in Italy and if it is cast in another, found em- was something which came and went pires. Of all men, Frederick the Second wholly by fits and starts. Later Empermight have been expected to be the ors were crowned at Milan, but none after founder of something, the beginner of Frederick was King of Italy in the same some new era, political or intellectual. real and effective sense that he was. He was a man to whom some great insti- Germany did not utterly vanish, or uttution might well have looked back as its terly split in pieces, like the sister kingcreator, to whom some large body of doms; but after Frederick came the men, some sect or party or nation, might Great Interregnum, and, after the Great well have looked back as their prophet or Interregnum, the royal power in Gerfounder or deliverer. But one of the most many never was what it had been before. gifted of the sons of men has left behind In bis hereditary kingdom of Sicily he him no memory of this kind, while men was not absolutely the last of his dynasty, whose gifts cannot bear a comparison for his son Manfred ruled prosperously with his are reverenced as founders by and gloriously for some years after his grateful nations, churches, political and death. But it is none the less clear that philosophical parties. Frederick in fact from Frederick's time the Sicilian kingfounded nothing, and sowed the seeds of dom was doomed; it was marked out to the destruction of many things. His be, what it has been ever since, divided, great charters to the spiritual and tem- reunited, divided again, tossed to and fro poral princes of Germany dealt the death-between one foreign sovereign and anblow to the imperial power, while he, to other. Still more conspicuously than all say the least, looked coldly on the rising was Frederick the last Christian King of power of the cities and on those commer-Jerusalem, the last baptized man who cial Leagues which were the best element really ruled the Holy Land or wore a of German political life in his time. In crown in the Holy City. And yet, fact, in whatever aspect we look at Fred- strangely enough, it was at Jerusalem, erick the Second, we find him, not the if anywhere, that Frederick might claim first, but the last, of every series to which in some measure the honors of a founder. he belongs. An English writer, two If he was the last more than nominal hundred years after his time, had the King of Jerusalem, he was also, after a penetration to see that he was really the considerable interval, the first; he recovast Emperor. He was the last prince ered the kingdom by his own address,

*

Capgrave, in his Chronicle, dates by Emperors down to Frederick, and then adds: "Fro this tyme forward oure annotacion schal be aftir

the regne of the Kyngis of Ynglond; for the Empire, in maner, sesed here."

and, if he lost it, its loss was, of all the
misfortunes of his reign, that which could
be with the least justice attributed to him
as a fault. In the world of elegant let-
ters Frederick has indeed some claim to
be looked on as the founder of that mod-
ern Italian language and literature which
first assumed a distinctive shape at his
Sicilian court. But in the wider field of
political history, Frederick appears no-
where as a creator, but rather everywhere
as an involuntary destroyer. He is in
everything the last of his own class, and
he is not the last in the same sense as
princes who perish along with their realms
in domestic revolutions or on the field of
battle. If we call him the last Emperor
of the West, it is in quite another sense
from that in which Constantine Palaiolo-
gos was the last Emperor of the East.
Under Frederick, the Empire and every-
thing connected with it seems to crumble
and decay while preserving its external
splendor. As soon as its brilliant pos-
sessor is gone, it at once collapses. It is
a significant fact that a prince, perhaps
in mere genius, in mere accomplishments,
the greatest who ever wore a crown, who
held the greatest place on earth, and was
concerned during a long reign in some
of the greatest transactions of one of the
greatest ages, seems never, even from his
own flatterers, to have received that ap-
pellation of Great which has been so lav-
ishly bestowed on far smaller men. The
world instinctively felt that Frederick,
the natural peer of Alexander, of Con-
stantine, and of Charles, had left behind
him no such creation as they left, and had
not influenced the world as they had in-
fluenced it. He was
"stupor mundi et
immutator mirabilis," but the name of
"Fredericus magnus" was reserved for
a prince of quite another age and house,
who, whatever else we say of him, at
least showed that he had learned the art
of Themistocles, and knew how to change
a small State into a great one.

among others. But a man who influences future ages is not necessarily a good man. Few men have ever had a more direct influence on the future history of the world than Lucius Cornelius Sulla. The man who crushed Rome's last rival, who saved Rome in her last hour of peril, who made her indisputably and permanently the head of Italy, did a work almost greater than the work of Cæsar. Yet the name of Sulla is one at which we almost instinctively shudder. So the faults and crimes of Frederick, his irreligion, his private licentiousness, his barbarous cruelty, would not of themselves be enough to hinder him from leaving his stamp upon his age in the way that other ages have been marked by the influence of men certainly not worse than he. Still it seems that, to exercise any great and lasting influence on the world, a man must be, if not virtuous, at least capable of objects and efforts which have something in common with virtue. Sulla stuck at no crime which would serve his country or his party, but it was for his country and his party, not for purely selfish ends, that he labored and that he sinned. Thorough devotion to any cause has in it something of self-sacrifice, something which, if not purely virtuous, is not without an element akin to virtue. Very bad men have achieved very great works, but they have commonly achieved them by virtue of those features in their character which made the nearest approach to goodness. The weak side in the brilliant career of Frederick is one which seems to have been partly inherent in his character, and partly the result of the circumstances in which he found himself. Capable of every part, and, in fact, playing every part by turns, he had no single definite object, pursued honestly and steadfastly, throughout his whole life. With all his powers, with all his brilliancy, his course throughout life seems to have been in a manner determined for Many causes combined to produce this him by others. He was ever drifting singular result, that a man of the extra-into wars, into schemes of policy, which ordinary genius of Frederick, and possessed of every advantage of birth, office, and opportunity, should have had so little direct effect upon the world. It is not enough to attribute his failure to the many and great faults of his moral character. Doubtless they formed one cause

seem to be hardly ever of his own choosing. He was the mightiest and most dangerous adversary that the Papacy ever had. But he does not seem to have withstood the Papacy from any personal choice, or as the voluntary champion of any opposing principle.