 Complete the following phrase:  Compounded with fears of what now guaranteed the safety of many of the smaller German states, the poet Christoph Martin Wieland lamented that Germany had now fallen into an apocalyptic time and stating Who can bear this disgrace, which weighs down upon a nation which was once so glorious?may God improve things, if it is still possible to improve them!. To some, the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire was seen as the final end of the ancient Roman Empire. In the words of Christian Gottlob von Voigt, a minister in Weimar, if poetry can go hand in hand with politics, then the abdication of the imperial dignity offers a wealth of material. The Roman Empire now takes its place in the sequence of vanquished empires. In the words of the English historian James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce in his 1864 work on the Holy Roman Empire, the empire was the oldest political institution in the world and the same institution as the one founded by Augustus in 27 BC. Writing of the empire, Bryce stated that nothing else so directly linked the old world to the newnothing else displayed so many strange contrasts of the present and the past, and summed up in those contrasts so much of European history. When confronted by the fall and collapse of their empire, many contemporaries employed the catastrophic 