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CHA fiction, which, under the title of "Thachkemoni" (see 2 Sam. xxiii. 8) ranks foremost in the secular poetry of the Jews. As a translator, Charisi was especially active on behalf of the Jews in the Provence, to whom the writings of the Spanish Jews of that period were unintelligible in their Arabic originals. Thus, we meet with a translation by Charisi of Maimonides' Commentary on the Mishna, order "Seraim;" of Maimonides' great work, the Moreh; of the Musre Haphilosophim (Moral Apothegms of the Philosophers); and the Iggereth Aristo (Aristotle's Letter); and even of several medical dissertations of Greek origin. Charisi's travels extended over many lands; to say nothing of the peninsular cities which he visited, he speaks familiarly of Marseilles, Alexandria, Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, Bagdad, &c. He returned in 1218, and probably died sometime before 1235.—(Zunz in Benjamin of Tudela, ii. p. 258; Dukes, Ehrensäulen; Carmoly, Revue Orientale, vol. iii.; Jest, Geschichte, &c.)—T. T.  CHARKE,, youngest daughter of Colley Cibber, the famous actor and poet laureate. Charlotte received a very masculine education, and married, while still young, a violinist of the name of Richard Charke. The profligacy of his life, however, soon caused a separation. Charlotte then betook herself to the stage; but quarrelling with Fleetwood the manager, she ultimately joined a strolling company, and died in a state of the utmost misery in 1760. In 1755 she published a narrative of her own life.—R. M., A.  CHARLEMAGNE, eldest son and successor of Pepin le Bref, first Carlovingian king of the Franks, born in 742. But little is known of his history until he ascended the throne at the age of twenty-six. At the age of eleven, in the year 753, he met Pope Stephen II. at the Lombard frontier of France, and conducted him to join his father Pepin at Pontyon. Next summer, with his father and younger brother, he received from the pope the royal consecration, and the title "patrician of Rome." We hear of him as engaged in the Aquitanian war which fills the close of Pepin's reign; and these are the only notices we possess respecting his youth. At the death of Pepin in 768, the empire was shared between Charlemagne and his brother Carloman. They extinguished together the last sparks of agitation in Aquitaine; and Bertrade the queen-mother, after reconciling a rising difference between the brothers, departed for Pavia to negotiate a union between Charles and the daughter of the king of Lombardy. Notwithstanding the violent repugnance of the pope to a match which would unite the pious royalty of the Franks to the nation of the Lombards, "perfidious, horrible, fetid, and the authors of leprosy," Charles repudiated his first wife to marry Desiderata. The marriage, however, was of no long continuance, the sensitive and delicate constitution of the Lombard princess not realizing the Frank's ideal. The divorce of Desiderata left room for the Suabian Hildegarde, a strong-voiced princess, and was closely followed by the death of Carloman, whose wife and children fled to Lombardy, leaving Charlemagne sole monarch of the Franks.

Before entering on this great reign, it is important to trace lightly the origin and nature of the "renaissance," of which it forms the culminating point. The barbarian invasions have of late assumed their real place in the perspective of history. The image of the Roman empire was rather shattered by them than effaced; like a reflection on water, it was ready to return when the ripple subsided. The barbarians felt awed, and as it were, trode softly. They were like beggars hutting in a palace—the place had harboured greater men than they. The church of the Romans had met, and even welcomed Clovis on the frontier. Signs and wonders lighted him to victory, and the ordeal of battle had vindicated the religion of the christians. But the history of the Franco-Gallic church is one of failure and corruption, and we must look to the Anglo-Saxon missionaries of Rome, seconded by the papacy and the mayors of the Austrasian palace, if we wish to identify the causes which, in the eighth century, infused an altered spirit into religion and politics. Three potent influences—the popes at Rome, the Pepins in Austrasia, and the Anglo-Saxon missionaries in the Teutonic forests—presided at the first of the three great "renaissances." The reign of Charles Martel exhibits the revolution in its clearest form. He is the man of the new religion, gathered by Boniface in "the huts where poor men lie." He plunders and degrades the Franco-Gallic church, but he sustains the pope against the Lombards, and he saves the world at Tours. Pepin le Bref continues the same policy. The almost Hebraic unction conferred on him by Boniface marks the rise of the royalty of the future; the Lombard wars of 754-55, and the territorial donation to the pope, settle the spiritual power on a firm basis; and a clause in a Saxon treaty of 753, binding the Saxons to allow the preaching of the gospel among them, indicates the missionary and crusading character of the new dynasty. A moral idea and purpose was penetrating and organizing the chaotic and incoherent nationalities of western barbarism; and the centre of this revolution was Rome, the only spot in the empire which had risen to a new life without the renovating touch of a barbarian conquest. No longer based, as in the days of the republic, on the exclusive domination of Italy—for the feeble or generous provincialism of the empire had long made the Eternal City the seat, instead of the possessor of imperial power—Rome directed the world in virtue of its past glories, and still more, of its precious possession of the bones of St. Peter. The characteristic of the Roman empire had been conquest made creative. Charlemagne was about to earn a revival of the title by a revival of the work. The atmospheric pressure of barbarism which destroyed the old empire showed some signs of recommencement. Between the Rhine and the Carpathians extended a vast surface of half-settled barbarous nations, entering like a wedge between the two civilizations of East and West. Since the era of the Roman empire little progress had been made in diminishing this standing menace to regular government. Varus had never really been avenged; Thuringia and Alemannia had, indeed, long been more or less subject to the Franks, and Frankish influence was felt in Bavaria and even Saxony; but between Metz and Constantinople was ranged a double cordon of uncivilized races—the first, Teutonic, consisting of the Frisons, Saxons, and Bavarians; the second formed by the Slavonic Wiltzes in the north, the Slavonians of Carinthia on the Adriatic, and between them the Mongol Avars, camped on the Hungarian plains. The great and permanent result of the reign of Charlemagne was to be the creation of Germany in this wilderness of barbarism.

Ten active years, the last of Pepin's life, had definitively carried the Frankish authority to the foot of the Pyrenees, but had allowed a pressure on the north-eastern frontier, which early attracted the attention of Charlemagne. Amid the shadows and solitude of their gigantic forests, the Saxons spumed the religion, the royalty, and the civilization of the Franks. Sullenly constant to the ideas of their fathers, the three tribes acknowledged no common king, retained the indefinite boundaries of the old Teutonic gau, and knew nothing of the division into tithings and hundreds, common to the Franks and the Saxons of England. War commenced characteristically by the burning of a church at Deventer in 772. The spring assembly of the Franks was held at Worms—the first of those thirty champs de Mai which gathered up the Frankish levies to the field of action, and then launched them on the Saxon marches. The attack was directed against the Hermen-Saul, a mysterious idol in the form of a column set on the summit of the castled rock of Ehresburg, the scene of the destruction of Varus and his legions, and possibly raised in commemoration of his victor. After destroying this image, Charlemagne penetrated to the Weser, and returned with twelve hostages to the patrimonial residence of the Pepins, at Héristal, near Liege.

The two next years were occupied by a war with Desiderius, king of the Lombards, who resented the divorce of his daughter, supported the sons of Carloman against their uncle, and had despoiled the pope of certain cities of the exarchate, in revenge for his refusal to adopt the same cause. Late in the autumn of 773 the Frankish forces gathered at Geneva, and, pressing through the snows of the Great St. Bernard and the Mount Cenis, besieged Desiderius in his capital of Pavia. The city opposing an obstinate resistance, Charlemagne, says Eginhard, "went to Rome to pray there," and renewed the alliance of the popes and the Carlovingians at the tomb of St. Peter. He returned to Pavia in time to receive the submission of its famished defenders. The Lombard duchies, with the exception of Benevento, made their submission. No hostile territory now intervened between Aix-la-Chapelle and Rome, but the native dukes and counts were left undisturbed in their authority, and, with the exception of a Frankish garrison in Pavia, there was little external change to tell that the king of the Franks was now the king of the Lombards. This settlement of Lombardy was of short duration. One year later, Roger, the duke of Friuli, revolted. Charles pounced upon him from the Alps with the 