ful protection of a monarch of whom the entire of Europe either admired the wisdom or dreaded the valour. The empress Irene offered him her hand; and Nicephorus, at the very time he had dethroned that princess, sought the friendship of Charlemagne, sent ambassadors to him, and shared with him the title of Augustus. The Caliph Aaron, appreciating the merit of Charlemagne, sent him many valuable presents; Rome proclaimed him emperor of the Romans, and the Saracens paid him homage for his conquests in Spain.

Master of France, Italy, and Germany, and the arbiter of the rest of Europe, Charles occupied himself in the cultivation of letters and of the arts; which necessarily lead to civilization and to domestic tranquillity. He had the talent of attracting and of attaching to his person all the learned men in Europe; among whom was the celebrated Alcuin, whom he loaded with honours, and with tokens of the purest esteem. He was himself fond of study, to which he devoted the few hours which the administration of his vast empire permitted; and the result of his converse with Alcuin was a sort of Grammar, which may be considered a singular monument of an extraordinary age. The code of laws of Charlemagne has been long universally admired. His genius extended itself throughout his empire, and conceived nothing but what was great and sublime. He was the first who projected the junction of the ocean and of the Black Sea, by means of a canal, which would unite the Rhine to the Danube.

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This great man was more than once exposed to the danger of conspirators, whose projects he circum

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CHARLEMAGNE.

vented by his prudence and his fortitude. One attack, however, sensibly affected him: it was that promoted by one of his children, Pepin le Bossu. In this circumstance, so delicate for a parent and so important, at the same time, for a king, Charlemagne had the address to blend the feelings of the one with the rights of the other, and restrained to perpetual imprisonment in a cloister his resentment against a rebellious and ungrateful son.

Charles would not have risen to this high degree of glory and of power, had he not united to the courage of a great warrior the talents of a skilful legislator; had not his genius, as extensive as profound, embraced at once every part of the administration, elevated itself, without effort, to the most sublime conceptions, and descended, with equal facility, to details in appearance the most minute.

Posterity has attributed to this extraordinary character the reproach of being too fond of women; and as frequently there is but a single step from censure to calumny, he has been accused of incest with his own daughters. Those who have fabricated or received, without due examination, an accusation of so serious a nature, should have confined themselves to a single reflection, which is, that similar atrocities have in general neither witnesses nor confidants, and that those even who might flatter themselves of being either the one or the other, would be only still more suspicious in the eyes of the unprejudiced historian. Charlemagne, it is pretended, was of an extraordinary size. He was naturally mild, beneficent, and friendly. He died at Aix-la-Chapelle, in the year 914, at the age of 72.

On the romantic history of Charlemagne and the twelve peers of France, called Paladins, which was a title of honour given by Charlemagne to that number of valiant men belonging to his court who employed their arms in his defence, many poems and wild stories of chivalry have been built, several of which possess much poetical imagery and expression, while others contain little else than dull narrative of fiction without imagination, and of events without interest. The principal of these paladins was Orlando, the great hero of chivalry, whose fabulous achievements filled all the books and provincial songs of that age. It is recorded that when William the Conqueror marched with his Normans to engage Harold, at the memorable battle of Hastings, his soldiers animated each other by singing the popular balled of the Exploits of Roland, or Orlando.