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Now, as to Charlemagne, he had tried the effect of forgiveness and lenity often in vain. Clemency was misinterpreted; it had been, and it would be, construed into conscious weakness. Under these circumstances, with a view, undoubtedly, to the final extinction of rebellions which involved infinite bloodshed on both sides, he permitted one trial to be made of a severe and sanguinary chastisement. It failed; insurrections proceeded as before, and it was not repeated. But the main difference in the principle of the two cases is this, that Charlemagne had exacted no penalty but one, which the laws of war in that age conferred, and even in this age the laws of allegiance. However bloody, therefore, this tragedy was no murder. It was a judicial punishment, built upon known acts and admitted laws, designed in mercy, consented to unwillingly, and finally repented. Lastly, instead of being one in a multitude of acts bearing the same character, it stood alone in a long career of intercourse with wild and ferocious nations, owning no control but that of the spear and sword.

Many are the points of comparison, and some of them remarkable enough, in the other circumstances of the two careers, separated by a thousand years. Both effected the passage of the Great St. Bernard; [Footnote 14] but the one in an age when mechanical forces, and the aids of art, were yet imperfectly developed; the other in an age when science had armed the arts of war and of locomotion with the fabulous powers of the Titans, and with the whole resources of a mighty nation at his immediate disposal. Both, by means of this extraordinary feat, achieved the conquest of Lombardy in a single hour; but Charlemagne, without once risking the original impression of this coup d’eclat; Napoleon, on the other hand, so entirely squandering and forfeiting his own success, that in the battle which followed he was at first utterly defeated, and but for the blunder of his enemy, and the sudden aid of an accomplished friend, irretrievably. Both suffered politically by the repudiation of a wife; but Charlemagne, under adequate provocation, and with no final result of evil; Bonaparte under heavy aggravations of ingratitude and indiscretion. Both assumed the character of a patron to learning and learned men; but Napoleon, in an age when knowledge of every kind was self-patronized–when no possible exertions of power could avail to crush it–and yet, under these circumstances, with utter insincerity. Charlemagne, on the other hand, at a time when the countenance of a powerful protector made the whole difference between revival and a long extinction–and what was still more to the purpose of doing honor to his memory, not merely in a spirit of sincerity, but of fervid activity. Not content with drawing counsel and aid from the cells of Northumberland, even the short time which he passed at Rome, he had ‘collected a number of grammarians (that is litterateurs) and arithmeticians, the poor remains of the orators and philosophers of the past, and engaged them to accompany him from Italy to France.’

What resulted in each case from these great efforts and prodigious successes? Each failed in laying the foundations of any permanent inheritance to his own glory in his own family. But Bonaparte lived to lay in ruins even his personal interest in this great edifice of empire; and that entirely by his own desperate presumption, precipitance, and absolute defect of self-command. Charlemagne, on his part, lost nothing of what he had gained: if his posterity did not long maintain the elevation to which he had raised them, that did but the more proclaim the grandeur of the mind which had reared a colossal empire, that sunk under any powers inferior to his own. If the empire itself lost its unity, and divided into sections, even thus it did not lose the splendor and prosperity of its separate parts; and the praise remains entire–let succeeding princes, as conservators, have failed as much and as excusably as they might–that he erected the following splendid empire:–The whole of France and Belgium, with their natural boundaries of the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Ocean, the Mediterranean; to the south, Spain, between the Ebro and the Pyrenees; and to the north, the whole of Germany, up to the banks of the Elbe. Italy, as far as the Lower Calabria, was either governed by his son, or tributary to his crown; Dalmatia, Croatia, Liburnia, and Istria, (with the exception of the maritime cities,) were joined to the territories, which he had himself conquered, of Hungary and Bohemia. As far as the conflux of the Danube with the Teyss and the Save, the east of Europe acknowledged his power. Most of the Sclavonian tribes, between the Elbe and the Vistula, paid tribute and professed obedience; and Corsica, Sardinia, with the Balearic Islands, were dependent upon his possessions in Italy and Spain.