It was a retributive justice which left Gibbon to deform, with such revolting obscenities, the pages in which he waged his disingenuous warfare against the one great purifying influence of human society. It may also have been retributive justice which has left the glory of Charlemagne to be overshadowed by the foul and unmerited reproach on which Gibbon dwells with such offensive levity; for the monarch was habitually regardless of that law, at once so strict and so benignant, which has rendered chastity the very bond of domestic love and happiness and peace. In bursting through the restraints of virtue, Charlemagne was probably the willing victim of a transparent sophistry. From a nature so singularly constituted as his, sweet waters or bitter might flow with equal promptitude. That peculiarity of temperament in which his virtues and his vices found their common root probably confounded the distinctions of good and evil in his self-judgments, and induced him to think lightly of the excesses of a disposition so often conducting him to the most noble and magnanimous enterprises; for such was the revelry of his animal life, so inexhaustible his nervous energies, so intense the vibrations of each successive impulse along the chords of his sensitive nature, so insatiable his thirst for activity, and so uncontrollable his impatience of repose, that, whether he was engaged in a frolic or a chase, composed verses or listened to homilies, fought or negotiated, cast down thrones or built them up, studied, conversed, or legislated, it seemed as if he, and he alone, were the one wakeful and really living agent in the midst of an inert, visionary, and somnolent generation.