THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
Of those who in August 1806 read in the English newspapers that the emperor Francis II had announced to the diet his resignation of the imperial crown there were probably few who reflected that the oldest political institution in the world had come to an end. yet it was so the empire which a note issued by a diplomatist on the banks of the danube extinguished was the same which the crafty nephw of julius had won for himself against the powers of the east beneath the cliffs of actium and which had preserved almost unaltered through eighteen centuries of the and through the greatest changes in extent in power in chareacter a title and pretensions from which all meaning had long since departed. noththing else so directly linked the old world to the new nothing else displayed so many strange contrasts of the present and the past and summed up in those contrasts so much of european history froam the days of constantine till far down into the middle ages it was conjointly with the papacy the...