l the literature,
cognizant of all the policy of his age; and fearless of any created
thing, on the earth or under it.

And, lastly, a craftsman absolutely master of his craft, and taking such
pride in the exercise of it as all healthy souls take in putting forth
their personal powers: proud also of his city and his people; enriching,
year by year, their streets with loftier buildings, their treasuries
with rarer possession; and bequeathing his hereditary art to a line of
successive masters, by whose tact of race, and honor of effort, the
essential skills of metal-work in gold and steel, of pottery,
glass-painting, woodwork, and weaving, were carried to a perfectness
never to be surpassed; and of which our utmost modern hope is to produce
a not instantly detected imitation.

These three kinds of persons, I repeat, we have to conceive before we
can understand any single event of the Middle Ages. For all that is
enduring in them was done by men such as these. History, indeed, records
twenty undoings for one deed, twenty desolations for one redemption; and
thinks the fool and villain potent as the wise and true. But Nature and
her laws recognize only the noble: generations of the cruel pass like
the darkness of locust plagues; while one loving and brave heart
establishes a nation.

85. I give the character of Barbarossa in the words of Sismondi, a man
sparing in the praise of emperors:--

"The death of Frederic was mourned even by the cities which so long had
been the objects of his hostility, and the victims of his vengeance. All
the Lombards--even the Milanese--acknowledged his rare courage, his
constancy in misfortune--his generosity in conquest.

"An intimate conviction of the justice of his cause had often rendered
him cruel, even to ferocity, against those who still resisted; but after
victory he took vengeance only on senseless walls; and irritated as he
had been by the people of Milan, Crema, and Tortona, and whatever blood
he had shed during battle, he never sullied his triumph by odious
punishments. In spite of the treason which he on one occasion used
against Alessandria, his promises were in general respected; and when,
after the peace of Constance, the towns which had been most inveterately
hostile to him received him within their walls, they had no need to
guard against any attempt on his part to suppress the privileges he had
once recognized."

My own estimate of Frederic's character would be scarcely