succeed in realizing the great ends to which he aspired, but his
aspirations were lofty. It was not in the power of any man to civilize
semi-barbarians in a single reign; but if he attempted impossibilities
he did not live in vain, since he bequeathed some permanent conquests
and some great traditions. He left a great legacy to civilization. His
life has not dramatic interest like that of Hildebrand, nor poetic
interest like the lives of the leaders of the Crusades; but it is very
instructive. He was the pride of his own generation, and the boast of
succeeding ages, "claimed," says Sismondi, "by the Church as a saint, by
the French as the greatest of their kings, by the Germans as their
countryman, and by the Italians as their emperor."

His remote ancestors, it is said, were ecclesiastical magnates. His
grandfather was Charles Martel, who gained such signal victories over
the Mohammedan Saracens; his father was Pepin, who was a renowned
conqueror, and who subdued the southern part of France, or Gaul. He did
not rise, like Clovis, from the condition of a chieftain of a tribe of
barbarians; nor, like the founder of his family, from a mayor of the
palace, or minister of the Merovingian kings. His early life was spent
amid the turmoils and dangers of camps, and as a young man he was
distinguished for precocity of talent, manly beauty, and gigantic
physical strength. He was a type of chivalry, before chivalry arose. He
was born to greatness, and early succeeded to a great inheritance. At
the age of twenty-six, in the year 768, he became the monarch of the
greater part of modern France, and of those provinces which border on
the Rhine. By unwearied activities this inheritance, greater than that
of any of the Merovingian kings, was not only kept together and
preserved, but was increased by successive conquests, until no so great
an empire has ever been ruled by any one man in Europe, since the fall
of the Roman Empire, from his day to ours. Yet greater than the