onths of
the year. He distinguished the winds by twelve special terms, whereas
before his time they had but four designations. He paid great attention
to astronomy. Being troubled one day at no longer seeing in the
firmament one of the known planets, he wrote to Alcuin, "What thinkest
thou of this Mars, which, last year, being concealed in the sign of
Cancer, was intercepted from the sight of men by the light of the sun?
Is it the regular course of his revolution? Is it the influence of the
sun? Is it a miracle? Could he have been two years about performing the
course of a single one?" In theological studies and discussions he
exhibited a particular and grave interest. "It is to him," say M.M.
Ampere and Haureau, "that we must refer the honor of the decision taken
in 794 by the Council of Frankfort in the great dispute about images; a
temperate decision which is as far removed from the infatuation of the
image-worshippers as from the frenzy of the image-breakers." And at the
same time that he thus took part in the great ecclesiastical questions,
Charlemagne paid zealous attention to the instruction of the clergy,
whose ignorance he deplored. "Ah," said he one day, "if only I had about
me a dozen clerics learned in all the sciences, as Jerome and Augustin
were!" With all his puissance it was not in his power to make Jeromes
and Augustins; but he laid the foundation, in the cathedral churches and
the great monasteries, of episcopal and cloistral schools for the
education of ecclesiastics, and carrying his solicitude still farther,
he recommended to the bishops and abbots that, in those schools, "they
should take care to make no difference between the sons of serfs and of
free men, so that they might come and sit on the same benches to study
grammar, music, and arithmetic." (_Capitularies_ of 789, art. 70.) Thus,
in the eighth century, he foreshadowed the extension which, in the
nineteenth, was to be accorded to primary instruction, to the advantage
and honor not only of the clergy, but also of the whole people.

After so much of war and toil at a distance, Charlemagne was now at Aix-
la-Chapelle, finding rest in this work of peaceful civilization. He was
embellishing the capital which he had founded, and which was called the
king's court. He had built there a grand basilica, magnificently
adorned. He was completing his own palace there. He fetched from Italy
clerics skilled in church music, a pious joyance