mselves, and they
had no longer that beauty lent by spontaneous and general feeling which
had been their strength and their apology. Weariness, doubt, and common
sense had, so far as this matter was concerned, done their work amongst
all classes of the feudal community. As Sire de Joinville, so also had
many knights, honest burghers, and simple country-folks recognized the
flaws in the enterprise, and felt no more belief in its success. It is
the glory of St. Louis that he was, in the thirteenth century, the
faithful and virtuous representative of the crusade such as it was when
it sprang from the womb of united Christendom, and when Godfrey de
Bouillon was its leader at the end of the eleventh. It was the
misdemeanor of St. Louis, and a great error in his judgment, that he
prolonged, by his blindly prejudiced obstinacy, a movement which was more
and more inopportune and illegitimate, for it was becoming day by day
more factitious and more inane.

In the long line of kings of France, called Most Christian Kings, only
two, Charlemagne and Louis IX., have received the still more august title
of Saint. As for Charlemagne, we must not be too exacting in the way of
proofs of his legal right to that title in the Catholic Church; he was
canonized, in 1165 or 1166, only by the anti-pope Pascal III., through
the influence of Frederick Barbarossa; and since that time, the
canonization of Charlemagne has never been officially allowed and
declared by any popes recognized as legitimate. They tolerated and
tacitly admitted it, on account, no doubt, of the services rendered by
Charlemagne to the papacy. But Charlemagne had ardent and influential
admirers outside the pale of popes and emperors; he was the great man and
the popular hero of the Germanic race in Western Europe. His saintship
was welcomed with acclamation in a great part of Germany, where it had
always been religiously kept up. Prom the earliest date of the
University of Paris, he had been the patron there of all students of the
German race. In France, nevertheless, his position as a saint was still
obscure and doubtful, when Louis XI., towards the end of the fifteenth
century, by some motive now difficult to unravel, but probably in order
to take from his enemy, Charles the Rash, Duke of Burgundy, who was in
possession of the fairest provinces of Charlemagne's empire, the
exclusive privilege of so great a memory, ordained that there should be
rendered to the ill