In the monastery of St. Gall, near the Lake of Constance, there was living in the ninth century a monk who relieved the tedium of his monotonous life and got the better, as he tells us, of much constitutional laziness by collecting anecdotes of the mighty monarch, with whose departed glories the world was at that time ringing. In this amusing legend Charlemagne, the conqueror, the legislator, the patron of learning, and the restorer of the empire, makes way for Charlemagne, the joyous companion, amusing himself with the comedy or rather with the farce of life, and contributing to it not a few practical jokes, which stand in most whimsical contrast with the imperial dignity of the jester. Thus, when he commands a whole levy of his blandest courtiers, plumed and furred and silken as they stood, to follow him in the chase through sleet and tempest, mud and brambles; or constrains an unhappy chorister, who had forgotten his responses, to imitate the other members of the choir by a long series of mute grimaces; or concerts with a Jew peddler a scheme for palming off, at an enormous price, on an Episcopal virtuoso, an embalmed rat, as an animal till then unknown to any naturalist--these, and many similar facetiæ, which in any other hands might have seemed mere childish frivolities, reveal to us, in the illustrious author of them, that native alacrity of spirit and child-like glee, which neither age nor cares nor toil could subdue, and which not even the oppressive pomps of royalty were able to suffocate. Nor was the heart which bounded thus lightly after whim or merriment less apt to yearn with tenderness over the interior circle of his home. While yet a child, he had been borne on men’s shoulders, in a buckler for his cradle, to accompany his father in his wars; and in later life, he had many a strange tale to tell of his father’s achievements. With his mother, Bertha, the long-footed, he lived in affectionate and reverend intimacy, which never knew a pause except on one occasion, which may perhaps apologize for some breach even of filial reverence, for Bertha had insisted on giving him a wife against his own consent. His own parental affections were indulged too fondly and too long, and were fatal both to the immediate objects of them and to his own tranquillity. But with Eginhard and Alcuin and the other associates of his severer labors, he maintained that grave and enduring friendship, which can be created only on the basis of the most profound esteem, and which can be developed only by that free interchange of thought and feeling which implies the temporary forgetfulness of all the conventional distinctions of rank and dignity.