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They occupied the first rank in feudal society and a rank unique in the body politic such as it was slowly becoming in the midst of reminiscences and traditions of the Jewish monarchy, of barbaric kingship, and of the Roman empire for a while resuscitated by Charlemagne.

The King then receives the gloves sprinkled with holy water, the ring, the sceptre, the Main de Justice. The Dauphin, the Duke of Orleans, and the Duke of Bourbon advance. The Archbishop, mitre on head, takes with both hands from the altar the crown of Charlemagne and holds it above the King's head without touching it. Immediately the three princes put out their hands to support it.

In the northeastern, or Frisian portion, however; the grants of land were never in the form of revocable benefices or feuds. With this important exception, the whole country shared the fate, and enjoyed the general organization of the Empire. But Charlemagne came an age too soon. The chaos which had brooded over Europe since the dissolution of the Roman world, was still too absolute.

Regardless of anachronism, they represented their heroes as the centre of a chivalric court, accoutred in the arms, and practising the customs of later centuries; they created in fact a new Arthur and a new Charlemagne, adapted to the new times. They brought to light the almost forgotten characters of antiquity.

What would she have given on this occasion for the ring which Archbishop Turpin wore on his finger, and which made Charlemagne run after him, in the same manner as it had made him run after one of his concubines, from whose finger Turpin had taken it after her death!

This writer also drew a comparison between Napoleon and Charlemagne, in which he designated the latter a barbarous despot and the former the new savior of the world. He says, "Napoleon first solved the enigma of equality and liberty his chief aim was the prevention of despotism his chief desire, to eternalize the dominion of virtue."

The Song of Roland, a real Homeric poem in its great beauty, and yet rude and simple as became its national character, bears witness to the prolonged importance attained in Europe by this incident in the history of Charlemagne.

The short delay would propagate the flame of enthusiasm; and his firmest hope was in a nation of soldiers still proud of the preëminence of their name, and ambitious to emulate their hero Charlemagne, who, in the popular romance of Turpin, had achieved the conquest of the Holy Land.

There is no knowing whether, in our days, with our freedom of thought and of the press, Charlemagne would have been a stranger to this feeling of antipathy; but what is certain is, that in his day, in the midst of a barbaric society, there was no inducement to it, and that, by nature, he was not disposed to it.

The progress of the one, however, went along with that of the other; and just as the Pope had extended his temporal dominions by encroachments of his own, and by gifts like those of Pepin and Charlemagne, the Exarchate and Pentapolis, uniting the patrimony of St.