formidable to the waning empire; and in the third century, they formed confederacies against the Romans; who, instead of having it in their power further to subjugate other nations, were now increasingly unable to defend themselves. At length, in the year 476, the northern hordes succeeded in dethroning Augustulus, the last sovereign of the western division of the empire, and in finally destroying the Roman power. Italy, after repeatedly changing its masters, fell, towards the close of the eighth century, to a considerable extent, under the dominion of the Lombards, another northern people. These so harassed Pope Adrain I. that he was glad to obtain the assistance of Charlemagne, then King of the Franks; who, having subdued the Lombards, and added their territory to his other conquests, revived the western empire; and was crowned, as its sovereign, at Rome, in the year 800, by Leo III. Thus was founded the great Frankish dominion, comprehending Gaul, Italy, and Germany, to the Northern Sea; and now, Germany, as part of this consolidation of territory, was, for the first time, united under the sway of one sovereign.

After the death of this great monarch, his unwieldly empire, now in the hands of his son Louis le Débonnaire, scarcely sustained itself; and three years after the death of Louis, it was formally divided, by the treaty of Verdun, in 843, among his sons, Louis, Charles, and Lothaire; of whom, the first obtained Germany, and was hence called Louis the German. Under his son, Charles le Gros, the great empire of Charlemagne reappeared, in 884; but the coherence of this heterogenous mass of nations was but of ephemeral duration; for, in 887, Charles was deposed by the German states, of which Arnulph, son of Charles's brother Carloman, was now made king. Arnulph died in 899, and was succeeded by his son Louis the Infant; on whose death, in 911, the Carlovingian race became extinct, and Conrad, duke of Franconia, was made Emperor of Germany, by election.

After Conrad's decease, Henry, surnamed the Fowler, was elected to the German throne, in 919; and with him commenced the dominion of the house of Saxony, from which country he had previously derived the title of Duke. The sway of these princes was remarkable for its warlike spirit, and for the victories that were gained over the Hungarian tribes: and, during this period, many of the German cities were founded. The practice of election to the empire now became an established law; and Germany Under was, from this time, a kind of imperial republic. Otho the Great, in the tenth century, the bounds of the

VOL. VI.

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empire were enlarged, so as to comprehend Rome and Italy; but the emperor could not receive his title of Augustus till he had been crowned by the Pope: from the time of Charles V., however, this practice was discontinued.

By the election of Conrad II, in 1024, the house of Saxony was succeeded by that of Franconia. In the reign of Henry III., of this dynasty, the German or Holy Roman Empire attained its maximum; comprehending Germany, Italy, Burgundy, and Lorraine; while Denmark, Hungary, Poland, and other districts of Sclavonia, were either its tributaries, or its vassals. About the beginning of the twelfth century, however, in consequence of the increasing influence of the papal church, and the rapid progress of the feudal system, which gave so much power to the electoral princes, the empire had begun to decline. On the death of Henry V, of Franconia, in 1125, Lothaire the Saxon received the crown.

In 1138, Conrad III., son of the Duke of Suabia, was elected to this unwieldly aggregate of power, as successor to Lothaire; and the emperors of the house of Suabia held the sovereignty upwards of another century, till the middle of the thirteenth.

During the reigns of the latter Franconian princes, and those of Suabia, the ambition of the Popes, who claimed supreme dominion over Christendom, gave rise to perpetual contests between them and the Emperors; and the factions of the Guelphs, and the Ghibelines, the respective partisans of each, held Germany and Italy in agitation for centuries; during the whole of which period the authority of the emperors was constantly on the wane.

After the death of the emperor Frederick II., in 1250, occurred that period of lawlessness and confusion, known by the name of the Great Interregnum. Conrad IV., the son of Frederick, had, on his father's death, assumed the imperial title; but William, Count of Holland, procured himself to be crowned in the cathedral of Aix-la-Chapelle, and subsequently defeated Conrad in battle. On the death of William, in 1256, the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne offered the imperial crown to Richard, Duke of Cornwall, brother to Henry the Third, of England, and assisted at his coronation, in 1257; while the Archbishop of Treves declared Alphonso, King of Castile, emperor. Richard soon abdicated, and retired to England, with the empty title of King of the Romans; which had been conferred on him previously to his election to the empire. From 1258 to 1273, the empire was without a head, and in a state of the utmost anarchy: Conradin, son of Conrad IV., the

last of the Hohenstaufen family, or the house of Suabia, perished on the scaffold, at Naples.

At length, in 1273, Rudolph, Count of Hapsburgh, was elected emperor, and laid the foundation of the greatness of the house of Austria, from which family most of the emperors were subsequently elected. The Austrian dynasty traces its origin to the lords of a small territory, on the river Aar, in the canton of Bern, in Switzerland; where the remains of an ancient castle testify to the antiquity of this imperial race. In 1440, Frederick III., Duke of Austria, was chosen to fill the German throne; and the sovereign dignity descended in the male line of his family, for about three hundred years. In 1519, Charles V., heir to the Spanish crown, and grandson to Maximilian, the successor of Frederick, received the imperial sceptre. The male line of the race of Rudolph of Hapsburgh became extinct in 1740, by the death of Charles VI. Maria Theresa, only daughter of Charles, married the Duke of Lorraine; and her son Joseph II. commenced the second imperial house of Austria; namely, the Lorraine branch. While the German empire continued, its sovereign was regarded as having the precedency among the potentates of Europe. His power in the administration, however, was very limited, the supreme authority residing in the Diet, which consisted of the colleges of the electors, the princes, and the imperial towns. The electors, and princes, became vested with little less than regal supremacy, in their respective territories; and were more powerful than some crowned heads. The people, originally, had a voice in the election of the emperor; but this function ultimately devolved on the King of Bohemia, the Dukes of Bavaria, Saxony, and Hanover, the Prince Palatine of the Rhine, the Marquis of Brandenburg, afterwards King of Prussia, and the three Archbishops of Maintz, Treves, and Cologne: the power of these lay and spiritual electors was almost equal to that of the emperors themselves. The spiritual, or archbishop-electors, certainly had functions and dignities of which the fishermen of Galilee never dreamed. They were Arch-Chancellors of the Holy Roman Empire in Germany, in Italy, and in Gaul, respectively; though the title, so far as it related to Gaul, had become a mere name, long before the dissolution of the imperial dominion.

To prevent the confusion that might sometimes arise from a contested election, while their was no sovereign, a successor to the emperor was frequently chosen by the electors, during his lifetime. This prince was crowned King of the Romans; and addressed, like the emperor,

with the title of 'majesty.' But the pomp and glory of the Holy Roman Empire have passed away; and, like the more ancient, and more powerful empires of the world, it is numbered among the things that were. Napoleon, who aspired to the dominion of the west, seems, when emperor of the French, to have had in view the ancient custom of the German empire, in styling his successor-apparent, King of Rome.

The French revolution, and the subsequent power o Bonaparte, rapidly hastened on the dismemberment of the Germanic empire. The provinces on the left bank of the Rhine were overwhelmed by the French: Bavaria, Wurtemberg, and Saxony, were erected into three kingdoms, with the annexation of smaller states; and the battle of Austerlitz, and the the subsequent treaty of Presburg, destroyed the power of Austria, and deprived her of her principalities of the Tyrol, and Suabia, her barriers against Italy and France. In 1806, soon after this treaty, most of the states in the north and south of Germany, renounced their connexion with the empire, and joined in a league, entitled 'The Confederation of the Rhine,' under the protection of the Emperor Napoleon. The confederated powers agreed to hold their legislative assemblies at Frankfort; and to restrict their services, and assistance, to each other in short, they were to constitute a cluster of military states, under the virtual dictation of Napoleon. The German emperor, Francis II., thus reduced in authority and power, formally abdicated the title of Emperorof Germany, at Vienna, August 6, 1806, assuming that of Emperor of Austria. Thus was dissolved an empire that had lasted, with fluctuations, for the space of a thousand years, dating from Charlemagne.

At the end of 1813, the French were expelled from every part of Germany; and the deposition of Napoleon, the downfall of the power of France, and the dissolution of the Confedary of the Rhine, in 1814, restored the smaller sovereigns to their dominions. On Bonaparte's reappearance in France, from Elba, in 1815, the most gigantic efforts were made, in Germany, to prevent his return to power; and on his final overthrow at Waterloo, on the 18th of June, in the same year, it is said that 1,200,000 men, armed, and unarmed, were prepared to march against him. The Congress of Vienna now made a proposal to Francis, the Austrian emperor, that he should resume the ancient title, which offer he declined to accept.

Germany once more assumed the appearance, at least, of a political whole, in the constitution of the confederation, (Bundes Verfassung,) which was formed in June,

1815. In this imperfectly balanced union of powers, Austria and Prussia have naturally a predominant influence; though they have withholden from the confederation several of their provinces which are not German. The component parts of the Germanic Confederation are thirty-eight, thirty-four being monarchical states, the heads of which have various titles. The four remaining parts, are the free cities of Frankfort on the Maine, Hamburg, Bremen, and Lubeck. The principal object of the confederacy was to secure the independence and integrity of each state; and to maintain internal, and external tranquillity, by uniting to check any mutual aggressions among the states themselves; and to repel the attack of a foreign enemy. In case of clashing interests, or the occurrence of disputes, no part of the confederation can go to war, or make peace, or a truce, or any such engagement, independently of the rest, each member being bound to yield to the decision of the whole. The internal management of the states is left, in general, to the care of the respective governments; and they are always to have in readiness for the purposes of the confederation, an army, levied in the proportion of one man to every hundred inhabitants. The Diet, or Assembly of Plenipotentiaries, consists of delegates from the various states, and is held at Frankfort.

LETTER VI.

Road to Cologne-Juliers-Bergheim-Catholic Subscription for the New Testament, in Germany-Cologne-The Rhine-ChurchesDeutz-Cologne Cathedral-The Three Kings-Churches of St. Ursula, St. Géréon, and St. Peter-Voyage on the Rhine to Bonn -Fieschi-The Seven Mountains-Bonn-Cathedral-Popplesdorf-Kreutzberg-Protestant Church at Bonn-Church of the Jesuits-King of Prussia's Birth-Day-University of Bonn.

MY DEAR FRIEND: We left the good accommodations of the Rhine Hotel, at Aix-la-Chapelle, at six in the morning, for Cologne; a distance of about forty-five miles. We stopped, first, at St. Juliers, a strongly fortified place, situated in a plain; where our horses were baited with bread. On inquiring what bread it was? the answer was, 'Rockenbrot,' rye-bread; and it was amusing to see the horses, and the driver, standing together, and sharing the same