Contents
-BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
S.A. Bent, comp. Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men. 1887.
Frederick I.
[Emperor of Germany; called from his red beard “Barbarossa;” born 1121; elected emperor, 1152; crowned at Rome, 1155; subjected Milan, 1158; defeated by the Lombards near Legnano, 1176, and made peace with the Pope; joined the third crusade, 1189, and was drowned in the Cydnus, 1190.]
My son is slain! But Christ still lives: let us on, my men!
When the death of his son, who accompanied him on the crusade, was reported to him. The father himself was soon to perish; and, as his body was not recovered, he was popularly supposed to be sleeping in the Untersberg, near Salzburg, where a peasant maintained that he saw him, “at a marble table,” says Carlyle (“Frederick the Great”), “leaning on his elbow, winking, only half asleep; beard had grown through the table, and streamed out on the floor.”The Duke of Ormond (1610–88) said, on hearing of the death of the brave and accomplished Earl of Ossory in 1680, “I would not exchange my dead son for any living son in Christendom.”
