Page:The empire and the century.djvu/40

 world, in its famous line of German monarchs from Otto the Great to Frederick II., the most splendid procession of kings in all recorded history.

It is, however, through the ideal that inspired its achievements rather than through the achievements themselves that the mediæval Empire appeals to our imaginations. The vision of the Imperator Pacificus which haunted the mind of the Middle Ages was never realized in practice, but the attempt to realize it, hopeless as it may have been, was the most splendid effort of political idealism that has yet been seen. The dream of political unity, the majestic theory of the Universal Empire corresponding to the Universal Church, with its head, the Emperor, the crown of the feudal system and the earthly King of kings, was only perhaps a dream, a theory, an aspiration; but it remains in many ways the noblest, the most coherent, and the most satisfying political ideal yet conceived by the mind of man, and it as invested the Middle Ages with a grandeur to which our modern world, with all its manifest gains and advantages, has not yet attained. No single work of human genius that has since been produced—none, perhaps, that has ever been produced—is to be compared in unity and scale and sustained greatness to the Divine Comedy; and Dante's poem is the epic of the Middle Ages, is based upon its system, is coloured throughout by its aspirations, and inspired by its ideals.

III. The mediæval Empire maintained itself for a time in defiance of the national feeling that was now asserting itself in various parts of Western Europe. But in the end national feeling proved too strong for it, and in the middle of the thirteenth century it ceased to exist as, in any real sense, an international State. Meanwhile, however, the national unity of both Germany and Italy had been sacrificed, and before long the primacy passed to the great national States, like France and Spain and