twice over for a year or two:--Alphonse and he were alike shy of
the Pope, as Umpire; and Richard, so far as his money went, found
some gleams of authority and comfortable flattery in the Rhenish
provinces: at length, in 1263, money and patience being both
probably out, he quitted Germany for the second and last time;
came home to Berkhamstead in Hertfordshire here, [Gough's
Camden, i.339.] more fool than he went. Till his
death (A.D. 1271), he continued to call himself, and was by many
persons called, Kaiser of the Holy Roman Empire;--needed a German
clerk or two at Berkhamstead, we can suppose: but never went back;
preferring pleasant Berkhamstead, with troubles of Simon de
Montfort or whatever troubles there might be, to anything Germany
had to offer him.

These were the Three futile Kaisers: and the LATE Kaiser Conrad's
young Boy, who one day might have swept the ground clear of them,
perished,--bright young Conradin, bright and brave, but only
sixteen, and Pope's captive by ill luck,--perished on the
scaffold; "throwing out his glove" (in symbolical protest) amid
the dark mute Neapolitan multitudes, that wintry morning. It was
October 25th, 1268,--Dante Alighieri then a little boy at
Florence, not three years old; gazing with strange eyes as the
elders talked of such a performance by Christ's Vicar on Earth.
A very tragic performance indeed, which brought on the Sicilian
Vespers by and by; for the Heavens never fail to pay debts,
your Holiness!--

Germany was rocking down towards one saw not what,--an Anarchic
Republic of Princes, perhaps, and of Free Barons fast verging
towards robbery? Sovereignty of multiplex Princes, with a Peerage