It would be too long a task to enumerate his labours and conquests for the faith; these are set forth in detail in the old Breviaries of France; it took him thirty-four years to subdue the idolatrous Saxons, alone, and the only penalty he imposed for the half of a lifetime spent in arduous struggles was that they should listen to instruction and embrace Christianity. Always hard on himself, fasting often for a week at a time, wearing, except on great occasions, rough, simple garments which, we are told, made him appear like one of the humblest of his subjects, his charity was all-embracing and reached to the confines of the known world. His honest humility made it dangerous to attempt to flatter him about his achievements. If any one spoke of his victories, he would point to the lance with which Longinus pierced the Saviour’s side and which he always carried with him, and say, “Give God the glory—_that_ is what overcame!” Oh, that we might sometimes call up some of the great visions of the past! Surely there was never one more significant and impressive than on the day when Charlemagne, surrounded by his Paladins, knelt on the sacred stone (still marked in the portico of St. Peter’s) and St. Leo took the heavy crown in his aged hands and placed it on that magnificent head. Charlemagne must have been one of those of whom the Prophet spoke, when he said that the kings of the earth should bring their honour and glory into Heaven. Would that he could return to us who so need to see, and so despair of seeing, a born ruler, reigning for God. Like our own Arthur, beloved of grateful and worshipping humanity, the hope of his return never quite died out. In the places where he passed, flashing by at the head of his chosen Paladins, is it only fancy that still makes us hear the thunder of the hoof-beats, the echo of the voice “sweet in music, strong in speech,” whose commands the world obeyed? the echo of the call of Roland’s horn—when he blew that last blast and Charlemagne, hundreds of miles away, leapt forth with his peers to the rescue? They came too late. The last of the Paladins fell fighting at Roncesvalles, far from where Charlemagne lies with his fathers among the Savoyan hills, by the dreamy Lake of Bourget. Never had monarch a fairer resting-place. In a long past summer I rowed across the lake to the lovely and splendid sanctuary, in the cool of the evening, when twilight was descending, mild as sleep, on the mountains; and earth and lake and sky were all one soft, mysterious blue. There were comrades with me, young and gay as I, but when we stood beside Charlemagne’s tomb in the dim church, a great silence fell upon us. We felt, though we could not see, the great angels standing round that royal grave—guarding it till the day when he who lies there shall come forth, and all the generations that went before and have come after him shall hear from God the praise he would not take from men—“Well done, thou good and faithful servant!”