The style of Sir Francis Palgrave is generally heavy, and his work will therefore be more prized by students than by the mere lovers of literature. His manner and spirit and the character of his performance may be most satisfactorily exhibited in a few specimen paragraphs, however, and we proceed to quote, first, from an introductory dissertation, some remarks on the arts, architecture, and civilization of Rome. He says: "Roman taste gave the fashion to the garment, Roman skill the models for the instruments of war. We have been told to seek in the forests of Germany the origin of the feudal system and the conception of the Gothic aisle. We shall discover neither there. Architecture is the costume of society, and throughout European Christendom that costume was patterned from Rome. Unapt and unskilful pupils, she taught the Ostrogothic workman to plan the palace of Theodoric; the Frank, to decorate the hall of Charlemagne; the Lombard, to vault the duomo; the Norman, to design the cathedral. Above all, Rome imparted to our European civilization her luxury, her grandeur, her richness, her splendor, her exaltation of human reason, her spirit of free inquiry, her ready mutability, her unwearied activity, her expansive and devouring energy, her hardness of heart, her intellectual pride, her fierceness, her insatiate cruelty, that unrelenting cruelty which expels all other races out of the very pale of humanity; whilst our direction of thought, our literature, our languages, concur in uniting the dominions, kingdoms, states, principalities, and powers, composing our civilized commonwealth in the Old Continent and the New, with the terrible people through whom that civilized commonwealth wields the thunderbolts of the dreadful monarchy, diverse from all others which preceded amongst mankind." The following is our author's view of the real and the ideal Charlemagne:-- "It seems Charlemagne's fate that he should always be in danger of shading into a mythic monarch--not a man of flesh and blood, but a personified theory. Turpin's Carolus Magnus, the Charlemagne of Roncesvalles; Ariosto's _Sacra Corona_, surrounded by Palatines and Doze-Piers, are scarcely more unlike the real rough, tough, shaggy, old monarch, than the conventional portraitures by which his real features have been supplanted.