the Holy Father to place himself in safety among her strongholds of Canossa.  Thither accordingly Gregory retired before the ending of that year; and bitter were the sarcasms uttered by the imperial partisans in Italy upon this protection offered by a fair countess to the monk who had been made a Pope.  The foul calumnies of that bygone age would be unworthy of even so much as this notice, if we did not trace in them the ineradicable Italian tendency to cynical insinuation—­a tendency which has involved the history of the Renaissance Popes in an almost impenetrable mist of lies and exaggerations.  Henry was in truth upon his road to Italy, but with a very different attendance from that which Gregory expected.  Accompanied by Bertha, his wife, and his boy son Conrad, the Emperor elect left Spires in the condition of a fugitive, crossed Burgundy, spent Christmas at Besancon, and journeyed to the foot of Mont Cenis.  It is said that he was followed by a single male servant of mean birth; and if the tale of his adventures during the passage of the Alps can be credited, history presents fewer spectacles more picturesque than the straits to which this representative of the Caesars, this supreme chief of feudal civility, this ruler destined still to be the leader of mighty armies and the father of a line of monarchs, was exposed.  Concealing his real name and state, he induced some shepherds to lead him and his escort through the thick snows to the summit of Mont Cenis; and by the help of these men the imperial party were afterwards let down the snow-slopes on the further side by means of ropes.  Bertha and her women were sewn up in hides and dragged across the frozen surface of the winter drifts.  It was a year memorable for its severity.  Heavy snow had fallen in October, which continued ice-bound and unyielding till the following April.

No sooner had Henry reached Turin, than he set forward again in the direction of Canossa.  The fame of his arrival had preceded him, and he found that his party was far stronger in Italy than he had ventured to expect.  Proximity to the Church of Rome divests its fulminations of half their terrors.  The Italian bishops and barons, less superstitious than the Germans, and with greater reason to resent the domineering graspingness of Gregory, were ready to espouse the Emperor’s cause.  Henry gathered a formidable force as he marched onward across Lombardy; and some of the most illustrious prelates and nobles of the South were in his suite.  A more determined leader than Henry proved himself to be, might possibly have forced Gregory to some accommodation, in spite of the strength of Canossa and the Pope’s invincible obstinacy, by proper use of these supporters.  Meanwhile the adherents of the Church were mustered in Matilda’s fortress; among whom may be mentioned Azzo, the progenitor of Este and Brunswick; Hugh, Abbot of Clugny; and the princely family of Piedmont.  ’I am become a second Rome,’ exclaims Canossa, in the language of Matilda’s rhyming