2 56. CHARLES THE GREAT. A. D. 7G8-814. 247
HENRY HALLAM (Middle Ayes I. 20) judges a little more favorably: " The great qualities of Charlemagne were, indeed, alloyed by the vices of a barbarian and a conqueror. Nine wives, whom he divorced with very little ceremony, attest the license of his private life, which his tem perance and frugality can hardly be said to redeem. Unsparing of blood, though not constitutionally cruel, and wholly indifferent to the means which his ambition prescribed, he beheaded in one day four thousand Saxons — an act of atrocious butchery, after which his persecuting edicts, pronouncing the pain of death against those who refused baptism, or even who ate flesh during Lent, seem scarcely worthy of notice. This union of barbarous ferocity with elevated views of national improvement might suggest the parallel of Peter the Great. But the degrading habits and brute violence of the Muscovite place him at an immense distance from the restorer of the empire.
" A strong sympathy for intellectual excellence was the leading cha racteristic of Charlemagne, and this undoubtedly biassed him in the chief political error of his conduct — that of encouraging the power and pretensions of the hierarchy. But, perhaps, his greatest eulogy is written in the disgraces of succeeding times and the miseries of Europe. He stands alone, like a beacon upon a waste, or a rock in the broad ocean. His sceptre was the bow of Ulysses, which could not be drawn by any weaker hand. In the dark ages of European history the reign of Charle- "inagne affords a solitary resting-place between two long periods of tur bulence and ignominy, deriving the advantages of contrast both from that of the preceding dynasty and of a posterity for whom he had formed an empire which they were unworthy and unequal to maintain."
G. P. R. JAMES (Hittory of Charlemagne, Lond., 1847, p. 499) : "No man, perhaps, that ever lived, combined in so high a degree those quali ties which rule men and direct events, with those which endear the pos sessor and attach his contemporaries. No man was ever more trusted and loved by his people, more respected and feared by other kings, more esteemed in his lifetime, or more regretted at his death.
HILMAX (Book V. ch. 1) : "Karl, according to his German appella tion, was the model of a Teutonic chieftain, in his gigantic stature, enormous strength, and indefatigable activity ; temperate in diet, and superior to the barbarous vice of drunkenness. Hunting and war were his chief occupations ; and his wars were carried on with all the ferocity of encountering savage tribes. But he was likewise a Roman Emperor, not only in his vast and organizing policy, he had that one vice of the old Roman civilization which the Merovingian kings had indulged, though not perhaps with more unbounded lawlessness. The religious emperor, in one respect, troubled not himself with the restraints of reli gion. The humble or grateful church beheld meekly, and almost with out remonstrance, the irregularity of domestic life, which not merely
248 FOURTH PERIOD. A. D. 590-1049.
indulged in free license, but treated the sacred rite of marriage as a covenant dissoluble at his pleasure. Once we have heard, and but once, the church raise its authoritative, its coinminatory voice, and that not to forbid the King of the Franks from wedding a second wife while his first was alive, but from marrying a Lombard princess. One pious ecclesiastic alone in his dominion, he a relative, ventured to protest aloud.1'
GUIZOT (Histoire de la civilisation en France, lepon XX.) : " Charle magne marque la limite a laquelle est enfin comommee la dissolution de Fancien mo fide remain et barbare, et ou, commence la formation du monde nouveau."
VETAULT (Charlemagne, 455, 458) : " Charlemagne fut, en effet, le pere du monde moderne et de la society europeenne. . . . Si Ch. ne peut etre legitemement honore comme un saint, il a droit du moins a la premiere place, parmis tons lesheros, dans V admiration des hommes ; car onne trouverait pas un autre souverain qui ait autant aime Vhum-anite et lui ait fait plus de bien. II est le plus glorieux, parce que . . . il a merite d' ttre proclame le plus honnete des grands hommes."
GIESEBRECHT, the historian of the German emperors, gives a glowing description of Charlemagne (1. 140) : " Many high-minded rulers arose in the ten centuries after Charles, but none had a higher aim. To be ranked with him, satisfied the boldest conquerors, the wisest princes of peace. French chivalry of later times glorified Charlemagne as the first cavalier ; the German burgeoisie as tfre fatherly friend of the people and the most righteous judge ; the Catholic Church raised him to the number of her saints ; the poetry of all nations derived ever new inspiration and strength from his mighty person. Never perhaps has richer life proceeded from the activity of a mortal man (Nie vielleicht ist r etcher es Leben von der Wirksamkeit eines sterblichen Menschen ausgegangeri)."
We add the eloquent testimony of an American author, PARKE GODWIN (History of France, N. Y., I860, vol. i. p. 410) : " There is to me some thing indescribably grand in the figure of many of the barbaric chiefs — Alariks, Ataulfs, Theodoriks, and Euriks — who succeeded to the power of the Romans, and in their wild, heroic way, endeavored to raise a fabric of state on the ruins of the ancient empire. But none of those figures is so imposing and majestic as that of Karl, the son of Pippin, whose name, for the first and only time in history, the admiration of mankind has indissolubly blended with the title the Great. By the peculiarity of his po sition in respect to ancient and modern times — by the extraordinary length of his reign, by the number and importance of the transactions in which he was engaged, by the extent and splendor of his conquests, by his signal services to the Church, and by the grandeur of his personal quali ties — he impressed himself so profoundly upon the character of his times, that he stands almost alone and apart in the annals of Europe. For nearly a thousand years before him, or since the days of Julius Caesar, no