rank and
on Lombard alike. The Pope and his clergy are to them magicians, against
whom neither sword nor lance avails; who can heal the sick and blast the
sound; who can call to their aid out of the clouds that pantheon of demi-
gods, with which, under the name of saints, they have peopled heaven; who
can let loose on them the legions of fiends who dwell in every cave,
every forest, every ruin, every cloud; who can, by the sentence of
excommunication, destroy both body and soul in hell. They were very loth
to fear God, these wild Teutons; therefore they had instead, as all men
have who will not fear God, to fear the devil.

So Pope Stephen goes to Pepin, the eldest son of the Church. He promises
to come with all his Franks. Stephen's conscience seems to have been
touched: he tries to have no fighting, only negotiation: but it is too
late now. Astolf will hear of no terms; Pepin sweeps over the Alps, and
at the gates of Pavia dictates his own terms to the Lombards. The old
Lombard spirit seems to have past away.

Pepin goes back again, and Astolf refuses to fulfil his promises. The
Pope sends Pepin that letter from St. Peter himself with which this
lecture commenced.

Astolf has marched down, as we heard, to the walls of Rome, laying the
land waste; cutting down the vines, carrying off consecrated vessels,
insulting the sacrament of the altar. The Lombards have violated nuns;
and tried to kill them, the Pope says; though, if they had really tried,
one cannot see why they should not have succeeded. In fact, Pope
Stephen's hysterical orations to Pepin must be received with extreme
caution. No Catholic historian of that age cares to examine the truth of
a fact which makes for him; nothing is too bad to say of an enemy: and
really the man who would forge a letter from St. Peter might dare to tell
a few lesser falsehoods into the bargain. Pepin cannot but obey so
august a summons; and again he is in Italy, and the Lombards dare not
resist him. He seizes not only all that Astolf had taken from the Pope,
but the Pentapolis and Exarchate, the property, if of any one, of the
Greek Emperors, and bestows them on Stephen, the Pope, and 'the holy
Roman Republic.'

The pope's commissioners received the keys of the towns, which were
placed upon the altar of St. Peter; and this, the Dotation of Pepin, the
Dotation of the Exarchate, was the first legal temporal sovereignty of
the Popes:--born in sin, and conceived in iniq