I can't resist transcribing the following, which is a quotation from
_Love_and_Sleep_ by John Crowley (Bantam Books, 1994). (It's fiction.)
| There are many Monarchs, and many Princes, but only one Emperor. Rudolf
| II, King in his own right of Hungary and Bohemia, Archduke of Austria,
| became Emperor by election and the chrism with which the Pope had anointed
| his head: Singular and Universal Monarch of the Whole Wide World. Or at
| least his shadow.
|
| His grandfather Charles, who had been king of all the lands Rudolf was
| king of, had been king in Spain too, ruler of the Netherlands and Low
| Countries; he was king of Savoy, lord of Naples and Sicily, he had had the
| Pope at his feet and sacked His City, Rome. God's scourge. Charles had had a
| device made for him, of all the famous devices and signs and emblems of
| great rulers the most famous, known and seen throughout Christendom and in
| lands around the world that the old emprerors in Rome had never known
| existed. Charles's emblem showed two pillars---they were the Pillars of
| Hercules that stand at the Gates of the Sea, the gates to the New World.
| Around these pillars ran a banner, that bore these words: _Plus_oultra_,
| "Even farther." The emblem was cut on medals and embossed on shields and
| breastplates, it was engraved on wood and printed on the title pages of
| geographies of the New World, and it was stamped on coins made of gold
| that was dug on the other side of the world. The emblem was so famous that
| it went on being stamped on gold coins for long after Charles was dead, for
| so long that the dies lost their details, and the words of the motto were
| worn away, and still it kept being stamped on Spanish coins, though all that
| was left to be seen were the two pillars and the twining banner, no longer
| meaning "Empire" or "Charles" or "Even farther" but only "dollar":
|
| $
|
| No kingdom is eternal.
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