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.
