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CHA  or freemen no longer flocked as assessors to the court of the count, who made their absence an opening for extortion and Charlemagne substituted the Scabini, seven assessors named by the count himself. But the principle and practice of territorial jurisdiction by the great lords within their feuds, appears clearly admitted in this reign, and the final policy of Charlemagne in Saxony indicates in the plainest manner that the proprietor was looked upon as the surest instrument in maintaining submission. This irresistible feeling placed beyond a doubt the ultimate triumph of the feudal organization; and Charlemagne stands in a double relation to the social system that supplied the place of his commanding intellect in the following century. On the one hand, by the impulse which he gave to the practice of commendation, he expressed his sense that the surest guarantee of society was then the government by and through great lords; and, on the other, he instinctively delayed the day when the great human organization of the western world—its brain at Rome, its heart at Aix-la-Chapelle—should degenerate into the low feudal type of the diffusion of nervous centres. By the precautions to which reference has already been made, by requiring an oath of fidelity from every free subject, by the promotion of foreigners, and by the recognition of low-born merit, but still more by his systematic elevation and purification of the church, he strove to win an hour or two of empire for the achievement of that great effort towards the settlement of the barbarous nations, which, we can conceive, he foresaw the utter impotence of feudalism to effect. The capitularies of Charlemagne, which an ignorant age or a grateful priesthood attributed to the direct inspiration of God, enact the payment of tithes, exempt the clergy from the jurisdiction of the civil courts, institute ordination examinations, and, towards the close of the reign, raise the episcopal courts high above the secular, authorize them to judge all manner of causes, and declare the bishops' sentence without appeal. As the world grew more worldly, the church grew more distinctively clerical. The bishops were forbidden to serve in the wars; the semi-monastic order of canons was instituted, and largely extended; the monasteries were reformed by St. Benedict d'Aniane. But the episcopate, under the successors of Charlemagne, degenerated into a hereditary caste of proprietors; its ideas were smothered in gold; and the church was not finally to shake the dust of the world from its feet, until Hildebrand, during the height of feudalism, enforced the celibacy of the clergy.

Never was empire founded on such heterogeneous bases. Like the architecture of the age, it pieced and patched the native barbarism of the Teuton with marble relics gathered from the rivers of Rome. The traditional instinct of imperial subordination had been effaced by the Teutonic immigrations, and its place was imperfectly supplied by an incessant and ubiquitous vigilance. The government of Charlemagne was "full of eyes, before and behind." The palace itself was pierced with peeping holes. Nothing was too minute for Carlovingian legislation. The mighty emperor, who denounced adoptianism, maintained the Filioque, or thundered against the adoration of images, stooped to prohibit drunkenness, and to forbid nuns writing love-letters. It was not well that the office of pope and emperor should be thus united. The dissolution of the Carlovingian power left the world free to carry out, in the hands of Hildebrand, that severance of the spiritual and temporal authority which was necessary to the age. But we recognize in this activity, not the meddling interference of a pedant, but the honest enthusiasm of a man who felt deeply, and reflected seriously, the fresh and varied interest of a world awakening to thought.

The story of the last fourteen years of Charlemagne's reign remains still to be told. For five of them he rested at Aix-la-Chapelle. The patriarch of Jerusalem sent the great crusading emperor the keys of the Holy Sepulchre; two embassies from Haroun al Raschid laboriously found their way to the west; the emir of Fez sent envoys; the pope of Rome and the converted chagan of the Avars met at the great northern capital, and across the now settled and christianized districts which separated the two empires, Charlemagne offered his hand to the Empress Irene. An assembly at Thionville in 806, ratified the testament of the emperor, which arranged that on his death the empire should be divided between his three sons, Charles, Louis, and Pepin. Pepin was to receive Italy, Bavaria, and all Alemannia south of the Danube, and east of the Upper Rhine; the kingdom of Louis to extend eastward to the Rhone and Mont Cenis; Charles to inherit the remainder. The pope's subscription of this testament was requested and secured, and it is remarkable that the arrangement of the kingdoms places Rome at the centre of the three, as the transalpine possessions of Pepin were reached by the valley of the Adige; while an entrance into Italy was secured to Charles by the Val' d'Aosta, to Louis by the Mont Cenis. The empire, which now extended from the Elbe to the Ebro, from Capua to the mouths of the Rhine, no longer dreaded the great waves of invasion which set across the eastern plains, and seemed ready to drown the kingdoms of the west. For eighty years, until the incursions of the Magyars, that danger was appeased; but forts rising at the mouths of rivers, fleets gathering within the harbour bar, lighthouses and watchtowers scattered along the headlands, betrayed the new danger that menaced the empire—the Northman and Saracen invasions by sea. Godfrey, king of Denmark, might avert the stream of Frankish invasion by the barrier of the Danewirk, drawn from sea to sea; but Charlemagne, in visiting a port of France, was subject to the vexation of seeing Norman pirates plundering in the harbour, and we read on an occasion of this kind, that the great emperor rose hurriedly from the table, and turning to the window which faced the east, the scene of his victories, stood gazing into the distance, his face streaming with tears. He lost his son Charles in 811; a gloom fell upon the palace; a bitter tone of sarcasm appears in the capitularies; and the burning of the great bridge of Mayence, the narrow portal through which christianity had entered Germany, was held to portend the death of its great constructor, who survived it but a few months. They buried him in his own cathedral. "There," says Palgrave, "they reverently deposited the embalmed corpse, surrounded by ghastly magnificence, sitting erect on his curule chair, clad in his silken robes, ponderous with broidery, pearls, and orfray, the imperial diadem on his head, his closed eyelids covered, his face swathed in the dead-clothes, girt with his baldric, the ivory horn slung in his scarf, his good sword, 'Joyeuse,' by his side, the gospel-book open on his lap, musk and amber and sweet spices poured around, his golden shield and golden sceptre pendant before him."—W. L. N.  CHARLEMONT,, first earl of, grandson of William second Viscount Charlemont, was born in Dublin in 1728. He received his early education at home, being too delicate for a public school, and in his eighteenth year he set out on a course of continental travel, from which he returned, at the end of eight years, with a mind richly stored both from observation and study. He was created a doctor of laws, and appointed governor of Armagh, and a privy councillor. At this time the government was in conflict with the Irish house of commons upon the celebrated question of the right to dispose of the surplus revenues of that kingdom. The house of commons carried their resolution, but the government, notwithstanding, applied the money according to their own discretion. Such a state of things was highly embarrassing, and Lord Charlemont's influence was resorted to in order, to effect a reconciliation between the parties—an object which he accomplished successfully. A spirit, however, was awakened by the contest that never subsided till it had manifested itself in the most remarkable events of the Irish history of that period. A steady supporter of the rights of his country and the privileges of his order. Lord Charlemont felt the injustice of depriving the Irish peers of their functions as an appellate court of law, and instituted a fictitious suit for the purpose of trying the question. Illness, however, prevented his prosecuting the matter to an issue. On the accession of George III. the peeresses of Ireland were at first denied the right to appear at the coronation according to their rank. Lord Charlemont took up the matter, and after experiencing much unworthy and vexatious opposition, succeeded in establishing their right, In the struggle which took place between the Irish house of commons and the crown. Lord Charlemont was an active sympathizer with the former, and one of five lords who protested against the proceedings of Lord Townshend. When the American and French fleets infested the Irish channel and seized on trading vessels, the English government, unable to afford sufficient protection, permitted Belfast to raise a volunteer corps. The example was followed by most of the northern towns, and that of Armagh was committed to Lord Charlemont. This was the origin of that celebrated body, the Irish volunteers, with which the name of Lord Charlemont is historically connected. On the 10th of November, 1783, a national convention of delegates from all the volunteer corps in Ireland met in Dublin, 