He was still master of all his powerful faculties; his knowledge of affairs, of mankind, of the peculiar interests of almost all the nations in Christendom, acquired by long employment in the most important negotiations both by Innocent the Third and by Honorius the Third; eloquence which his own age compared to that of Tully; profound erudition in that learning which, in the medieval churchman, commanded the highest admiration. No one was his superior in the science of the canon law; the Decretals, to which he afterwards gave a more full and authoritative form, were at his command, and they were to him as much the law of God as the Gospels themselves, or the primary principles of morality. The jealous reverence and attachment of a great lawyer to his science strengthened the lofty pretensions of the churchman. “Frederick the Second, with many of the noblest qualities which could captivate the admiration of his own age, in some respects might appear misplaced, and by many centuries prematurely born. Frederick having crowded into his youth adventures, perils, successes, almost unparalleled in history, was now only expanding into the prime of manhood.