I have, however, already observed that Charlemagne had other rules or habits of conduct which were the indigenous growth of his own mind. It was only in a mind of surpassing depth and fertility that such maxims could have been nurtured and made to yield their appropriate fruits; for, first, he firmly believed that the power of his house could have no secure basis except in the religious, moral, intellectual, and social improvement of his subjects; and, secondly, he was no less firmly persuaded that in order to effect that improvement it was necessary to consolidate all temporal authority in Europe by the reconstruction of the Cæsarian empire--that empire beneath the shelter of which religion, law, and learning had so long and so widely flourished throughout the dominions of imperial Rome. Gibbon has remarked, that of all the heroes to whom the title of “the Great” had been given, Charlemagne alone has retained it as a permanent addition to his name. The reason may, perhaps, be that in no other man were ever united in so large a measure, and in such perfect harmony, the qualities which, in their combination, constitute the heroic character, such as energy, or the love of action; ambition, or the love of power; curiosity, or the love of knowledge; and sensibility, or the love of pleasure--not, indeed, the love of forbidden, of unhallowed, or of enervating pleasure, but the keen relish for those blameless delights by which the burdened mind and jaded spirits recruit and renovate their powers--delights of which none are susceptible in the highest degree but those whose more serious pursuits are sustained by the highest motives and directed toward the highest ends; for the charms of social intercourse, the play of buoyant fancy, the exhilaration of honest mirth, and even the refreshment of athletic exercises, require, for their perfect enjoyment, that robust and absolute health of body and of mind, which none but the noblest natures possess and in the possession of which Charlemagne exceeded all other men. His lofty stature, his open countenance, his large and brilliant eyes, and the dome-like structure of his head imparted, as we learn from Eginhard, to all his attitudes the dignity which becomes a king, relieved by the graceful activity of a practiced warrior. He was still a stranger to every form of bodily disease when he entered his seventieth year; and although he was thenceforward constrained to pay the usual tribute to sickness and to pain, he maintained to the last a contempt for the whole _materia medica_, and for the dispensers of it, which Molière himself, in his gayest mood, might have envied. In defiance of the gout, he still followed the chase, and still provoked his comrades to emulate his feats in swimming, as though the iron frame which had endured nearly threescore campaigns had been incapable of lassitude and exempt from decay.