of the West--the Holy Roman Empire, which was supposed to be the great
temporal power. As the Pope, or Patriarch, was deemed the head of all
bishops, so the Emperor was to be deemed the head of all kings of the
West, from the Danube and Baltic to the Atlantic Ocean--the whole
country that had once been held by Rome, and then had been wrested from
her by the various German or Teutonic races. The island of Great Britain
was a sort of exception to the general rule. Like Gaul, it had once been
wholly Keltic, but it had not been as entirely subdued by the Romans,
and the overflow of Teutons came very early thither, and while they were
yet so thoroughly Pagan that the old Keltic Church failed to convert
them, and the mission of St. Augustine was necessary from Rome.

A little later, when Charles the Great formed his empire of Franks,
Germans, Saxons, and Gauls, Egbert gathered, in like manner, the various
petty kingdoms of the Angles and Saxons under the one dominant realm of
Wessex, and thus became a sort of island Emperor.

It seems, however, to be a rule, that nations and families recently
emerged from barbarism soon fade and decay under the influence of high
civilization; and just as the first race of Frankish kings had withered
away on the throne, so the line of Charles the Great, though not
inactive, became less powerful and judicious, grew feeble in the very
next generation, and were little able to hold together the multitude of
nations that had formed the empire.

Soon the kingdom of France split away from the Empire; and while a fresh
and more able Emperor became the head of the West, the descendants of
the great Charles still struggled on, at their royal cities of Laon and
Soissons, with the terrible difficulties brought upon them by restless
subjects, and by the last and most vigorous swarm of all the Teutonic