building, about four English miles from Coblenz, close to the Rhine and the small town of Rhense, at which formerly the kings and emperors were proclaimed on their election. They next took the prescribed oath, and could then take their appointed seat, and confirm the privileges of the several states; and they exercised their new sovereignty in dubbing some favourites as knights. The building was surrounded and shadowed by thick walnut-trees, and erected of squared stone in a heptagon, with seven arches, and is supported on nine pillars, one of which upholds the centre. These seven arches form openings, by which the interior may be entirely inspected, and support a vaulted roof, and are raised sixteen steps above the level of the ground: two towers on each side are either for defence or molestation; and the entire circumference is about forty ells, its diameter about thirteen, and its height nine and a half. Within are seven stone seats, for the then seven electors; the situation being chosen for its contiguity to the territories and residences of the three spiritual and the Palatine elector. The municipality of Rhense had some privileges, renewed in 1521, for keeping the building in repair. Three emperors—Henry VII., 1308; Charles VI., 1340; Ruprecht von der Pfalz, 1400—owe their elevation, and the throne of Charlemagne, to an election on this spot; and here also Wenceslaus was, at the general cry of indignation and abhorrence through the country, solemnly and justly deposed. Its open walls have echoed to many a hot debate amongst the princely voters: the important Chur-Verein was here discussed and decreed; and of still greater progress in the cause of social security was it when here was put an end to all the intestine wars and feudal broils throughout Germany, by the Landfrieden. So late as the latest decennium of the fifteenth century, Maximilian I. was induced to respect and keep up the charter by dubbing a knight within the building after his election at Frankfort, on the road to his coronation at Aachen. But the transference of the former ceremony to that free city lost Rhense its respect and the maintenance due from the neighbouring towns; it had crumbled almost to a ruin when the armies of revolutionary France approached the Rhine: their enmity of everything regal caused them to root up even the foundations, and, as much as in them lay, to destroy every trace of its previous history and recollections. Luckily, representations and plans of the original building existed, with sufficient patriotism in the archæological body of a neighbouring town to collect funds to rebuild it in 1848, exactly according to the original plan; and it was thought a fortunate conjuncture at the period, that the erection was ready for inauguration on the 18th May, 1848, the day of the opening of what was then hailed as the first great Parliament "für ein freies vereinigtes Deutschland."
