companied by the Pope, left the church and advanced along the
so-called "Triumphal Way," through the flower-bedecked city, amid the
ringing of all the bells, to the Lateran. At special stations were
posted clergy singing praises, and the _scholae_ or guilds placed to
salute the Emperor as he passed. Chamberlains scattered money before and
behind the procession, and all the scholae and the officials of the
palace received the _presbyterium_ or customary present of money. A
banquet closed the solemnities in the papal palace.

Such are merely the barest outlines of an imperial coronation of this
period. The ceremonies, borrowed from Byzantine pomp, had been
established since Charles the Great, and had remained essentially the
same, although, in the course of time, many details had been altered and
others had been introduced. The magnificence of these spectacles is no
longer rivalled by the pageantry of our days. The multitudes of dukes
and counts, of bishops and abbots, knights and nobles with their
retinues, the splendor of their attire, the strangeness of their faces
and their tongues, the martial array of warriors, the mystic
magnificence of the papacy with all its orders in such picturesque
costume, the aspect of secular Rome, of judges and senators, of consuls
and _duces_, of the militia with their banners, in curious, motley,
fantastic attire; lastly, as the sublime scene of the drama, the stern,
gloomy, ruinous city, through which the procession solemnly
advanced--all combined to produce a picture of such mighty and universal
historic interest that even a Roman accustomed to the pomp of Trajan's
period could not have beheld it without feelings of astonishment.

These coronation processions restored to the city its character of
metropolis. The Romans of the time might flatter themselves that the
emperors whom they elected still ruled the universe. The strangers who
flocked to the city freely distributed their gold, and the hungry
populace could live for weeks on the proceeds of the coronation.

J.E. DARRAS

The accession of Gregory VI was the harbinger of an epoch of moral
renaissance. The wise Pontiff, whose glory it had been to free the
Church from a disgraceful yoke, proved himself worthy of the sovereign
power, as much by the zeal with which he wielded as by the noble
disinterestedness with which he resigned it. He found the temporal
domains of the Church so far diminished that they hardly furnished the
Pop