he
so often preferred the poverty of the north to the riches of the south.
The three-and-thirty campaigns laboriously consumed in the woods and
morasses of Germany would have sufficed to assert the amplitude of his
title by the expulsion of the Greeks from Italy and the Saracens from
Spain. The weakness of the Greeks would have insured an easy victory;
and the holy crusade against the Saracens would have been prompted by
glory and revenge, and loudly justified by religion and policy. Perhaps,
in his expeditions beyond the Rhine and the Elbe, he aspired to save
his monarchy from the fate of the Roman empire, to disarm the enemies of
civilized society, and to eradicate the seed of future emigrations.
But it has been wisely observed, that, in a light of precaution, all
conquest must be ineffectual, unless it could be universal, since the
increasing circle must be involved in a larger sphere of hostility. The
subjugation of Germany withdrew the veil which had so long concealed the
continent or islands of Scandinavia from the knowledge of Europe, and
awakened the torpid courage of their barbarous natives. The fiercest of
the Saxon idolaters escaped from the Christian tyrant to their brethren
of the North; the Ocean and Mediterranean were covered with their
piratical fleets; and Charlemagne beheld with a sigh the destructive
progress of the Normans, who, in less than seventy years, precipitated
the fall of his race and monarchy.

Had the pope and the Romans revived the primitive constitution, the
titles of emperor and Augustus were conferred on Charlemagne for
the term of his life; and his successors, on each vacancy, must have
ascended the throne by a formal or tacit election. But the association
of his son Lewis the Pious asserts the independent right of monarchy and
conquest, and the emperor seems on this occasion to have foreseen and
prevented the latent claims of the clergy. The royal youth was commanded
to take the crown from the altar, and with his own hands to place it on
his head, as a gift which he held from God, his father, and the
nation. The same ceremony was repeated, though with less energy, in
the subsequent associations of Lothaire and Lewis the Second: the
Carlovingian sceptre was transmitted from father to son in a lineal
descent of four generations; and the ambition of the popes was reduced
to the empty honor of crowning and anointing these hereditary princes,
who were already invested with their power an