also other anachronisms and inaccuracies, so that, although Fantuzzi accepted its authenticity, the Fragment is now regarded as a counterfeit, and of no historical value. Another still more remarkable document, the Donation of Constantine, which gives to the popes the free and perpetual sovereignty of Rome, Italy, and the provinces of the West, lost its credit centuries ago. Putting aside these fictions, we find that the true Ecclesiastical State reached from Ferrara, in the north, to Terracina, in the south-a distance in a straight line of about 220 miles. It included the Exarchate of Ravenna, and the Pentapolis granted by Pippin, with Narnia also ;* Bologna, Ancona, and other cities and their environs, surrendered by Desiderius, the last Lombard king; Sabine Patrimony recovered from the Lombards by Karl the Great; towns and territory in Tuscany, also the gift of the Patrician, § together with Capua and other Campanian towns lying on the south-east borders of the Roman duchy.|| the Within and without these dominions, which the popes. only ruled, they owned and possessed the extensive domains known as the Patrimonies of St. Peter-lands and cities in Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily, in Calabria and Naples, and in every part of Italy, sometimes forming petty provinces, as in Campania and the Roman duchy, containing in the aggregate about 1,800 square miles, and yielding an annual revenue of not less than £300,000. But if the Pope was now one of the most powerful of Italian princes, and if he was quit of all risk of interference from Constantinople, his position as a temporal prince was exceedingly precarious; and without the protection of the mighty Patrician, he would have been lost. Hadrian's IV on Map. * Marked I on Map. + II and III on Map. letters to his patron, contained in the Codex Carolinus, are full of endless complaints against every one almost for thwarting his new authority, and setting him at nought. His subjects were as refractory, and the Roman nobility as turbulent as ever; his city was torn by internal feuds, and he had no army at command to enforce obedience. Moreover, he had found a fresh and very troublesome adversary in the Archbishop of Ravenna, who showed no disposition. to accept the new order of things, and submit himself to the political authority of the Roman Bishop. The relations between the two prelates had rarely been satisfactory in past years. Ravenna had seen something of imperial pomp and splendour for two centuries as the residence of emperors and exarchs; and at one time, its archbishop and citizens might have indulged in the hope of overshadowing even Rome itself, when the once mighty capital of the world, half desolated and worried by barbarians, languished for three centuries under the neglect of her absentee emperors. The Roman pontiff therefore possessed a very uncertain hold over the Exarchate; both prelate and people resented his authority; and in about two hundred years from this time, this portion of Pippin's and Karl's Donation passed to the archbishop. Such being the temper of his nominal subjects, Leo the Third, the successor of Hadrian, sought to strengthen his position by a closer and more enduring bond with his patron and Patrician. With this aim, immediately after his enthronement, he sent the Roman banner to Karl, with the keys of the city and the keys of the shrine of St. Peter; and at the same time instructed his envoys to make, on his behalf, an oath of fealty to the king, as his sovereign temporal lord. This remarkable step was taken without any consultation with the senate, the army, or the citizens of Rome; and the exasperated nobility, instigated by Leo's two nephews, conspired to get rid of him. He was accused of serious crimes, was assaulted in the public street during a solemn procession, and barbarously maltreated; an attempt being made to put out his eyes, so as to disqualify him for office. He fortunately managed to escape ultimately to Paderborn, where Karl was warring against the Saxons (799). Next year the royal Patrician entered Rome, declared Leo, after trial, to be innocent of the charges laid against him, and on Christmas Day, 800, was solemnly crowned by the Pontiff and acclaimed by the assembled citizens, "Karl Augustus, Emperor of the Romans." So ended, with the last year of this eventful eighth century, the long conflict between Emperor, Pope, and Lombard, in which the first almost disappeared from Italy, and the third became a mere geographical name; while the second entered upon that chequered career of secular power which was destined to bring so much trouble and confusion upon the Holy Republic of the Church of God. 143 EDWARD GIBBON. BY THE REV. W. E. SIMS. Ir was the fashion in the century that has come to an end to speak in terms of almost contemptuous disparagement of the century of Gibbon. The recollection of that period was apparently preserved merely as a foil to heighten by contrast the charms of a more attractive age. We were assured by a chorus of voices that we had emerged, as it were, from a period characterised by Philistine dulness, a "gravity," as Schopenhauer would say, "akin to that of animals" into one sparkling with intellectual animation and ennobled by moral virtues. Then, our English existence was that of the chrysalis-torpid, inert, buried for the most part in worthless bran-while now we rejoice in the splendour and brilliancy of a life of continuous activity, sunning our wings in the pleasant summer air. It is an agreeable fortune to be born in the best of all possible centuries, and we do well to rejoice in our privileges, our railroads and steamboats, our gas and electricity, our cabs and cars, and all the thousand and one resources of modern life, and yet it is only the very superior person who can afford to wave aside with a gesture of supercilious contempt, as a dead and profitless epoch, the century of Gibbon. If, indeed, it be dead, some of the mummies deserve examination. When Gibbon, a delicate child, flitting from school to school "at the expense of many tears and some blood purchased the knowledge of the Latin syntax," Alexander Pope was lying on his deathbed; Dean Swift, |