Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 5 (1897).djvu/306

 284 THE DECLINE AND FALL apparent magnitude of an object is likewise enlarged by an unequal comparison ; and the ruins of Palmyra derive a casual splendour from the nakedness of the surrounding desert. Without injustice to his fame, I may discern some blemishes in the sanctity and greatness of the restorer of the Western empire. Of his moral virtues, chastity is not the most con- spicuous ; ^^^ but the public happiness could not be materially injured by his nine wives or concubines, the various indulgence of meaner or more transient amours, the multitude of his bastards whom he bestowed on the church, and the long celibacy and licentious manners of his daughters, i^- whom the father was suspected of loving with too fond a passion. I shall be scarcely permitted to accuse the ambition of a conqueror ; but, in a day of equal retribution, the sons of his brother Carloman, the Merovingian princes of Aquitain, and the four thousand five hundred Saxons who were beheaded on the same spot, would have something to allege against the justice and humanity of Charlemagne. His treatment of the vanquished Saxons ^^"^ was an abuse of the right of conquest ; his laws were not less sanguinary than his arms ; and, in the discussion of his motives, whatever is subtracted from bigotry must be imputed to temper. The sedentary reader is amazed by his incessant activity of mind and body ; and his subjects and enemies were not less astonished at his sudden presence, at the moment when they believed him at the most distant extremity of the empire ; neither peace nor war, nor summer nor winter, were a season of repose : and our fancy cannot easily reconcile the annals of his reign with the geography of his expeditions. But this activity was a national rather than a personal virtue ; the vagrant life of a Frank was spent in the chase, in pilgrim- i"! The vision of Weltin, composed by a monk eleven years after the death of Charlemagne, shews him in purgatory, with a vulture, who is perpetually gnawing the guilty member, while the rest of his body, the emblem of his virtues, is sound and perfect (see Gaillard, tom. ii. p. 317-360). if'^The marriage of Eginhard with Imma, daughter of Charlemagne, is, in my opinion, sufficiently refuted by the probrum and sitspicio that sullied these fair damsels, without excepting his own ife (c. xix. p. 98-100, cum Notis Schmincke). The husband must have been too strong for the historian. 1"^ Besides the massacres and transmigrations, the pain of death was pronounced against the following crimes: i. The refusal of baptism. 2. The false pretence of baptism. 3. A relapse to idolatry. 4. The murder of a priest or bishop. 5. Human sacrifices. 6. Eating meat in Lent. But every crime might be expiated by baptism or penance (Gaillard, tom. ii. p. 241-247) ; and the Christian Saxons became the friends and equals of the Franks (Struv. Corpus Hist. Germanicae, p. 133).