erial crown: "not that she repented of having so far obliged him,
on the contrary, she would rejoice if she could confer on him still
greater benefits."

As Frederic listened to this letter, which his chancellor Raynald read
up to him, he reddened with anger at that part of it which spoke of
his crown as a gift of the Church; but at the word "benefits" he could
not control himself, for, by this word he insisted, in the blindness
of passion, that the pope meant to assert that the empire was a feoff
of the Holy See.

The fact was, the original word _beneficium_ did signify, in the
corrupt Latin of the middle ages, a feoff as well as a benefit in
general; and this was enough for the emperor's humour, who would
listen to no explanation from the legates, that the word was used, not
in its technical, but its classical sense. In the heat of the dispute
which ensued, Cardinal Roland,--afterwards Pope Alexander
III.--exclaimed: "From whom then hath the Emperor his dignity, if not
from the Pope?" Whereupon, the Count Palatine, Otho of Bavaria, one of
the courtiers present, seized by a fit of fury, drew his sword, and
rushed towards the cardinal; but was checked in his purpose by Frederic,
who threw himself between the two; and then closed the audience by
ordering the legates to be escorted back to Rome, with injunctions not
to deviate from the directest line of route, nor to tarry in any
ecclesiastical domain through which they might pass.

Historians are agreed that Adrian had no intention, in the present
case, of practically asserting,--as Frederic in his politic wrath said
he did,--the feudal superiority in question. The English pope,
however, was not the less a stickler for that superiority in theory,
as well as Cardinal Roland and the rest of the hierarchy;--a
superiority which Pope Gregory VII. supported by the feelings and
convictions of Christendom at his day, taught as follows: that the
Pope, as Vicar on earth of our Lord in heaven, ought to stand superior
over every human power; and sought to realize it as the only means of
reforming the frightful disorders of that age.

Frederic Barbarossa, on the other hand, took, as was natural to a man
like him, bent on crushing the spiritual beneath the temporal power,
the opposite side of the question;--a side which was just as repugnant
to the feeling of the overwhelming majority of Christendom then, as it
was a century before; nay, which was at variance with his own
conscie