Serenities, and where the Diet was largely concerned with
regulating the claims of the envoys of princes to sit on seats of red
cloth or on the less honourable green cloth, or with apportioning the
traditional thirty-seven dishes of the imperial banquet so that the
last should be borne by a Westphalian envoy?[84]

Among these spectral survivals of an outworn life the incursion of
Napoleon across the Rhine had aroused a panic not unlike that which
the sturdy form of AEneas cast on the gibbering shades of the Greeks in
the mourning fields of Hades. And when, on August 1st, 1806, the heir
to the Revolution notified to the Diet at Ratisbon that neither he nor
the States of South and Central Germany any longer recognized the
existence of the old Empire, feebler protests arose than came from the
straining throats of the scared comrades of Agamemnon. The Diet itself
uttered no audible sound. The Emperor, Francis II., forthwith declared
that he laid down his crown, absolved all the electors and princes
from their allegiance, and retired within the bounds of the Austrian
Empire.

Thus feebly flickered out the light which had shed splendour on
mediaeval Christendom. Kindled in the basilica of St. Peter's on
Christmas Day of the year 800 in an almost mystical union of spiritual
and earthly power, by the blessing of Pope Leo on Karl the Great, it
was now trodden under foot by the chief of a more than Frankish State,
who aspired to unquestioned sway over a dominion as great as that of
the mediaeval hero. For Napoleon, as Protector of the Rhenish
Confederation, now controlled most of the German lands that
acknowledged Charlemagne, while his hold on Italy was immeasurably
stronger. Further parallels between two ages and systems so unlike as
those of Charlemagne and his imitator are of course superficial; and
Napoleon's attempt at impressing the imagination of the Germans seems
to us to smack of unreality. Yet we must remember that they were then
the most impressionable and docile of nations, that his attempt was
made with much skill, and that none of the appointed guardians of the
old Empire raised a voice in protest while he imposed a constitution
on the fifteen Princes of the new Confederation.

They included the rulers of South Germany, as well as Dalberg the
Arch-Chancellor, who now took the title of Prince Primate, the
Grand-Duke of Berg, the Landgrave, now Grand-Duke, of Hesse-Darmstadt,
two Princes of the House of Nassau, a