e
which the Greeks call pleurisy; nevertheless the emperor persisted in his
abstinence, supporting his body only by drinks taken at long intervals;
and on the seventh day after that he had taken to his bed, having
received the holy communion," he expired about nine A.M., on Saturday,
the 28th of January, 814, in his seventy-first year.

"After performance of ablutions and funeral duties, the corpse was
carried away and buried, amidst the profound mourning of all the people,
in the church he himself had built; and above his tomb there was put up a
gilded arcade with his image and this superscription: 'In this tomb
reposeth the body of Charles, great and orthodox emperor, who did
gloriously extend the kingdom of the Franks, and did govern it happily
for forty-seven years. He died at the age of seventy years, in the year
of the Lord 814, in the seventh year of the Indiction, on the 5th of the
Kalends of February.'"

If we sum up his designs and his achievements, we find an admirably sound
idea and a vain dream, a great success and a great failure.

Charlemagne took in hand the work of placing upon a solid foundation the
Frankish-Christian dominion by stopping, in the north and south, the
flood of barbarians and Arabs--Paganism and Islamism. In that he
succeeded: the inundations of Asiatic populations spent their force in
vain against the Gallic frontier. Western and Christian Europe was
placed, territorially, beyond reach of attacks from the foreigner and
infidel. No sovereign, no human being, perhaps, ever rendered greater
service to the civilization of the world.

Charlemagne formed another conception and made another attempt. Like
more than one great barbaric warrior, he admired the Roman empire that
had fallen, its vastness all in one, and its powerful organization under
the hand of a single master. He thought he could resuscitate it,
durably, through the victory of a new people and a new faith, by the hand
of Franks and Christians. With this view he labored to conquer, convert,
and govern. He tried to be, at one and the same time, Caesar, Augustus,
and Constantine. And for a moment he appeared to have succeeded; but the
appearance passed away with himself. The unity of the empire and the
absolute power of the emperor were buried in his grave. The Christian
religion and human liberty set to work to prepare for Europe other
governments and other destinies.

Great men do great things which would not get d