... Dickens is to me a writer apart. I have been reading and re-reading his novels since I was six. I know his characters as I hardly know any of the… - Sidney Dark

In the early years of the eleventh century the . , the father of , deposed three popes, no man saying him nay. The removal of the right of election from the Roman nobility to the , however, brought to an end an system under which it was the Emperor who really decided who should sit on the papal throne, and was determined that lesser ecclesiastical appointments should also be taken out his hand. In the complicated feudal system, bishops and abbots often held their lands as the vassals of a suzerain lord, compounding for the military service demanded from lay vassals. It was the habit, too, of the pious to endow monasteries and churches on the condition that they held the patronage. And, in one way and another, the noble, the prince, and the emperor claimed the right of ecclesiastical investiture which in effect meant the right of nomination to the offices of the Church. This lay patronage naturally led to simony, and it was the fashion for rich abbeys and attractive bishoprics to be sold to the highest bidder, to the scandal of the faithful and the hindrance of the work of the Church.

Great literature is the creation of its age and its nation. It is inconceivable that Shakespeare's plays could have been written anywhere but in England and at any time but the later Renaissance. ... But while great literature is the child of one age it is the father of the next. As a nation reads, so it becomes. Let me decide what the people shall read, and you may make their laws. In saying this I am not merely referring to social and political and philosophic treatises. I am thinking of the whole gamut of a library, and particularly of works of the imagination.

was with at at the time of the in 1813. She went back to at the request of the , who assured her that the position of herself and her children was perfectly safe. The allied kings and statesmen waited on her. She was treated with the utmost deference, but it was she who grieved for in far more than , and before the began, Josephine, shriven and with her children kneeling by her side, died with the name of Bonaparte on her lips. Twenty thousand persons passed the catafalque where the Empress lay in state. Royal honours were hers at her funeral.