red to was in
reality amazed--not one contemptuous, not one maledictory. It is only
our gentle minstrel of the meres who sits in the seat of the
scornful--only the hermit of Rydal Mount who invokes the malison of
Nature.

What the scene verily was, and how witnessed, it will not take long to
tell; nor will the tale be useless: but I must first refer the reader to
a period preceding, by nearly a century, the great symbolic action under
the porch of St. Mark's.

82. The Protestant ecclesiastic, and infidel historian, who delight to
prop their pride, or edge their malice, in unveiling the corruption
through which Christianity has passed, should study in every fragment of
authentic record which the fury of their age has left, the lives of the
three queens of the Priesthood, Theodora, Marozia, and Matilda, and the
foundation of the merciless power of the Popes, by the monk Hildebrand.
And if there be any of us who would satisfy with nobler food than the
catastrophes of the stage, the awe at what is marvelous in human sorrow
which makes sacred the fountain of tears in authentic tragedy, let them
follow, pace by pace, and pang by pang, the humiliation of the fourth
Henry at Canossa, and his death in the church he had built to the Virgin
at Spire.

His antagonist, Hildebrand, died twenty years before him; captive to the
Normans in Salerno, having seen the Rome in which he had proclaimed his
princedom over all the earth, laid in her last ruin; and forever. Rome
herself, since her desolation by Guiscard, has been only a grave and a
wilderness[89]--what _we_ call Rome, is a mere colony of the stranger
in her "Field of Mars." This destruction of Rome by the Normans is
accurately and utterly the end of her Capitoline and wolf-suckled power;
and from that day her Leonine or Christian power takes its throne in the
Leonine city, sanctified in tradition by its prayer of safety for the
Saxon Borgo, in which the childhood of our own Alfred had been trained.

And from this date forward, (recollected broadly as 1090, the year of
the birth of St. Bernard,) no longer oppressed by the remnants of Roman
death,--Christian faith, chivalry, and art possess the world, and
recreate it, through the space of four hundred years--the twelfth,
thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries.

And, necessarily, in the first of these centuries comes the main debate
between the powers of Monk and Knight which was reconciled in this scene
under the por