g from his horse, was left, lost among the dead.
The Empress, whose mercy to Milan he had forbidden, already wore
mourning for him in Pavia, when her husband came, solitary and
suppliant, to its gate.

The lesson at last sufficed; and Barbarossa sent his heretic bishops to
ask forgiveness of the Pope, and peace from the Lombards.

Pardon and peace were granted--without conditions. "Caesar's successor"
had been the blight of Italy for a quarter of a century; he had ravaged
her harvests, burnt her cities, decimated her children with famine, her
young men with the sword; and, seven times over, in renewed invasion,
sought to establish dominion over her, from the Alps to the rock of
Scylla.

She asked of him no restitution;--coveted no province--demanded no
fortress, of his land. Neither coward nor robber, she disdained alike
guard and gain upon her frontiers: she counted no compensation for her
sorrow; and set no price upon the souls of her dead. She stood in the
porch of her brightest temple--between the blue plains of her earth and
sea, and, in the person of her spiritual father, gave her enemy pardon.

"Black demons hovering o'er his mitered head," think you, gentle
sonneteer of the daffodil-marsh? And have Barbarossa's race been taught
of better angels how to bear themselves to a conquered emperor,--or
England, by braver and more generous impulses, how to protect his exiled
son?

The fall of Venice, since that day, was measured by Byron in a single
line:

"An Emperor tramples where an emperor knelt."

But what words shall measure the darker humiliation of the German
pillaging his helpless enemy and England leaving her ally under the
savage's spear?

91. With the clews now given, and an hour or two's additional reading of
any standard historian he pleases, the reader may judge on secure
grounds whether the truce of Venice and peace of Constance were of the
Devil's making: whereof whatever he may ultimately feel or affirm, this
at least he will please note for positive, that Mr. Wordsworth, having
no shadow of doubt of the complete wisdom of every idea that comes into
his own head, writes down in dogmatic sonnet his first impression of
black instrumentality in the business; so that his innocent readers,
taking him for their sole master, far from caring to inquire into the
thing more deeply, may remain even unconscious that it is disputable,
and forever incapable of conceiving either a Catholic's feeling, or a