Some such event had long been expected.  The Holy Roman Empire, after a thousand years of life, had been stricken unto death at Austerlitz.  The seizure of Hanover by Prussia had led the King of Sweden to declare that he, for his Pomeranian lands, would take no more share in the deliberations of the senile Diet at Ratisbon which took no notice of that outrage.  Moreover, Ratisbon was now merely the second city of Bavaria, whose King might easily deny to that body its local habitation; and the use of the term Germanic Confederation in the Treaty of Pressburg sounded the death-knell of an Empire which Voltaire with equal wit and truth had described as neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.  In the new age of trenchant realities how could that venerable figment survive—­where the election of the Emperor was a sham, his coronation a mere parade of tattered robes before a crowd of landless 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.