After Frederick II.

the Empire played no important part in Italy until its rights were reasserted by Charles V.upon the platform of modern politics.

A power so external to the true life of the nation, so successfully resisted, so impotent to control the development of the Italians, cannot be chosen as the central point of their history.

If we elect the Republics, we are met with another class of difficulties.

The historian who makes the Commune his unit, who confines attention to the gradual development, reciprocal animosities, and final decadence of the republics, can hardly do justice to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the Papacy, which occupy no less than half the country.