and pleasing, also, to the people. On Sunday, in the next month, August, 813, Charlemagne repaired, crown on head, with his son Louis, to the cathedral of Aix-laChapelle, laid upon the altar another crown, and, after praying, addressed to his son a solemn exhortation respecting all his duties as king toward God and the Church, toward his family and his people, asked him if he were fully resolved to fulfill them, and, at the answer that he was, bade him take the crown that lay upon the altar and place it, with his own hands, upon his head, which Louis did, amid the acclamations of all present, 6 who cried, 'Long live the Emperor Louis!' Charlemagne then declared his son Emperor jointly with him, and ended the solemnity with these words: 'Blessed be Thou, O Lord God, who hast granted me grace to see with mine own eyes my son seated on my throne!'" And Louis set out again immediately for Aquitaine.

He was never to see his father again. Charlemagne, after his son's departure, went out hunting, according to his custom, in the forest of Ardenne, and continued during the whole autumn his usual mode of life. "But, in January, 814, he was taken ill," says Eginhard, "of a violent fever, which kept him to his bed. Recurring forthwith to the remedy he ordinarily employed against fever, he abstained from all nourishment, persuaded that this diet would suffice to drive away, or, at the least, assuage the malady; but, added to the fever, came that pain in the side which the Greeks call pleurisy. Nevertheless, the Emperor persisted in his abstinence, supporting his body only by drinks taken at long intervals; and on the seventh day after that he had taken to his bed, having received the holy communion," he expired about nine o'clock on the morning of Saturday, the 28th of January, 814, in his seventy-first year.

“After performance of ablutious and funeral duties, 8 the corpse was carried away and buried, amid the profound mourning of all the people, in the church he himself had built; and above his tomb there was put up a gilded arcade, with his image and this superscription : 'In this tomb reposeth the body of Charles, great and orthodox Emperor, who did gloriously extend the kingdom of the Franks, and did govern it happily for fortyseven years. He died at the age of seventy years, in the year of the Lord 814, in the seventh year of the Indiction, on the 5th of the Kalends of February.'

If we sum up his designs and his achievements, we 9 find an admirably sound idea, a vain dream, a great success, and a great failure.

Charlemagne took in hand the work of placing upon a solid foundation the Frankish Christian dominion by stopping, in the north and south, the flood of barbarians and Arabs-Paganism and Islamism. In that he succeeded; the inundations of Asiatic populations spent their force in vain against the Gallic frontier. Western and Christian Europe was placed, territorially, beyond reach of attacks from the foreigner and infidel. No sovereign, no human being, perhaps, ever rendered greater service to the civilization of the world.

Charlemagne formed another conception, and made 10 another attempt. Like more than one great barbaric warrior, he admired the Roman Empire that had fallen, its vastness all in one, and its powerful organization under the hand of a single master. He thought he could resuscitate it, durably, through the victory of a new people and a new faith, by the hand of Franks and Christians. With this view he labored to conquer, convert, and govern. He tried to be, at one and the same time, Cæsar, Augustus, and Constantine.

And for a

moment he appeared to have succeeded; but the appearance passed away with himself. The unity of the empire and the absolute power of the Emperor were buried in his grave. The Christian religion and human liberty set to work to prepare for Europe other governments and other destinies.

CONDEMNATION OF JOAN OF ARC.-HER DEATH.ESTIMATE OF HER CHARACTER.

Joan of Arc is one of those rare phenomena that puzzle the philosopher as well as the historian. I have elsewhere remarked that a resemblance may be discerned between Mohammed and Joan of Arc. Such characters are developed by nearly all great religious struggles, and may be regarded as the joint product of enthusiasm and fanaticism.

Joan was captured by the Burgundian allies of the English, and was by the English delivered to the French. She was tried by the spiritual power, condemned, and executed as a sorceress, 1431 a. D. This was during the great Hundred Years' War between France and England, which began in the reign of Edward III.

Lamartine and De Quincey may be read for views of Joan of Arc's character.

1 ON the 29th of May the tribunal met again. Forty judges took part in the deliberation. Joan was unanimously declared a case of relapse, was found guilty, and cited to appear next day, the 30th, on the Vieux-Marché to hear sentence pronounced, and then undergo the punishment of the stake.

When, on the 30th of May, in the morning, the Dominican brother Martin Ladvenu was charged to announce

her sentence to Joan, she gave way at first to grief and terror. “Alas!” she cried, “am I to be so horribly and cruelly treated, that this my body, full pure and perfect and never defiled, must to-day be consumed and reduced to ashes? Ah! I would seven times rather be beheaded than burned!" The Bishop of Beauvais at this moment came up. "Bishop," said Joan, "you are the cause of my death; if you had put me in the prisons of the Church, and in the hands of fit and proper ecclesiastical warders, this had never happened. I appeal from you to the presence of God." One of the doctors 2 who had sat in judgment upon her-Peter Maurice— went to see her, and spoke to her with sympathy. “Master Peter," said she to him, "where shall I be to-night?" "Have you not good hope in God?" asked the doctor. "O! yes," she answered; "by the grace of God I shall be in paradise.” Being left alone with the Dominican, Martin Ladvenu, she confessed, and asked to communicate. The monk applied to the Bishop of Beauvais to know what he was to do. "Tell brother Martin," was the answer, "to give her the eucharist and all she asks for." At nine o'clock, having resumed her woman's dress, Joan was dragged from prison, and driven to the Vieux-Marché. From seven to eight hundred soldiers 3 escorted the car, and prohibited all approach to it on the part of the crowd which encumbered the road and the vicinities; but a man forced a passage, and flung himself toward Joan. It was a canon of Rouen, Nicolas Loiseleur, whom the Bishop of Beauvais had placed near her, and who had abused the confidence she had shown him. Beside himself with despair, he wished to ask pardon of her; but the English soldiers drove him back with violence and with the epithet of traitor, and, but for the intervention of the Earl of Warwick, his life would have

4 been in danger. Joan wept and prayed, and the crowd afar off wept and prayed with her. On arriving at the place, she listened in silence to a sermon by one of the doctors of the court, who ended by saying: "Joan, go in peace; the Church can no longer defend thee; she gives thee over to the secular arm." The laic judges, Raoul Bouteillier, baillie of Rouen, and his lieutenant, Peter Darou, were alone qualified to pronounce sentence of death; but no time was given to them. The priest Massieu was still continuing his exhortations to Joan, but "How now, priest!" was the cry from amid the soldiery; "are you going to make us dine here?"-" Away with her-away with her!" said the baillie to the guards; and 5 to the executioner, "Do thy duty." When she came to the stake, Joan knelt down, completely absorbed in prayer. She had begged Massieu to get her a cross, and an Englishman present made one out of a little stick and handed it to the French heroine, who took it, kissed it, and laid it on her breast. She begged brother Isambard de la Pierre to go and fetch the cross from the church of St. Sauveur, the chief door of which opened on the VieuxMarché, and to hold it "upright before her eyes till the coming of death, in order," she said, "that the cross whereon God hung might, as long as she lived, be continually in her sight"; and her wishes were fulfilled. She wept over her country and the spectators as well as over herself. "Rouen, Rouen!" she cried, "is it here that I must die? Shalt thou be my last resting-place? I 6 fear greatly thou wilt have to suffer for my death." It is said that the aged Cardinal of Winchester and the Bishop of Beauvais himself could not stifle their emotion—and, peradventure, their tears. The executioner set fire to the fagots. When Joan perceived the flames rising, she urged her confessor, the Dominican brother Martin Ladvenu, to

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