He was beginning to be at once the Magnificent Sovereign, the knight, the poet, the lawgiver, the patron of arts, letters, and science; the Magnificent Sovereign, now holding his court in one of the old barbaric and feudal cities of Germany among the proud and turbulent princes of the Empire, more often on the sunny shores of Naples or Palermo, in southern and almost Oriental luxury; the gallant Knight and troubadour Poet, not forbidding himself those amorous indulgences which were the reward of chivalrous valor and of the ‘gay science’; the Lawgiver, whose farseeing wisdom seemed to anticipate some of those views of equal justice, of the advantages of commerce, of the cultivation of the arts of peace, beyond all the toleration of adverse religions, which even in a more dutiful son of the Church would doubtless have seemed godless indifference. Frederick must appear before us in the course of our history in the full development of all these shades of character; but besides all this, Frederick’s views of the temporal sovereignty were as imperious and autocratic as those of the haughtiest churchman of the spiritual supremacy.