generally, has
pronounced his most beautiful eulogy, "written in the disgraces and
miseries of succeeding times. He stands alone like a rock in the ocean,
like a beacon on a waste. His sceptre was the bow of Ulysses, not to be
bent by a weaker hand. In the dark ages of European history, his reign
affords a solitary resting-place between two dark periods of turbulence
and ignominy, deriving the advantage of contrast both from that of the
preceding dynasty and of a posterity for whom he had founded an empire
which they were unworthy and unequal to maintain."

To such a tribute I can add nothing. His greatness consists in this,
that, born amidst barbarism, he was yet the friend of civilization, and
understood its elemental principles, and struggled forty-seven years to
establish them,--failing only because his successors and subjects were
not prepared for them, and could not learn them until the severe
experience of ten centuries, amidst disasters and storms, should prove
the value of the "old basal walls and pillars" which remained unburied
amid the despised ruins of antiquity, and show that no structure could
adequately shelter the European nations which was not established by the
beautiful union of German vigor with Christian art,--by the combined
richness of native genius with those immortal treasures which had
escaped the wreck of the classic world.

AUTHORITIES.

Eginhard's Vita Caroli Magni; Le Clerc's De la Bruyere, Histoire du
Regne de Charlemagne; Haureau's Charlemagne et son Cour; Gaillard's
Histoire de Charlemagne; Lorenz's Karls des Grossen. There is a
tolerably popular history of Charlemagne by James Bulfinch, entitled
"Legends of Charlemagne;" also a Life by James the novelist. Henri
Martin, Sismondi, and Michelet may be consulted; also Hallam's Middle
Ages, Milman's Latin Christianity, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, Biographic Universelle, and the Encyclopaedias.

HILDEBRAND.

* * * * *

A.D. 1020-1085.

THE PAPAL EMPIRE.

We associate with Hildebrand the great contest of the Middle Ages
between spiritual and temporal authority, the triumph of the former, and
its supremacy in Europe until the Reformation. What great ideas and
events are interwoven with that majestic domination,--not in one age,
but for fifteen centuries; not religious merely, but political,
embracing as it were the whole progress of European society, from the
fall of the Roman E