Here is the manner in which Sir Francis Palgrave contrasts and compares the two emperors, Charlemagne and Napoleon:-- "Napoleon sought the creation of an anti-christian imperial pontificate--the caliphate of positive civilization; his aspiration was the establishment of absolute dominion, corporeal and intellectual; mastery over body and soul; faith respected only as an influential and venerable delusion; the aiding powers of religion accepted until she should be chilled out, and the unfed flame expire, and positive philosophy complete her task of emancipating the matured intellect from the remaining swathing bands which had been needful during the infancy of human society. And the theories of Charlemagne and Napoleon, though irreconcileably antagonistic, in their conception, would, were either fully developed, become identical in their result, notwithstanding their contrarieties. They start in opposite directions, but, circling round their courses, would--were it permitted that they should persevere continuously and consistently--meet at the same point of convergence, and attain the same end. "Moreover, the territorial empires of Napoleon and Charlemagne had their organically fatal characteristics in common. Each founder attempted to accomplish political impossibilities--to conjoin communities unsusceptible of amalgamation; to harmonize the discordant elements which could only be kept together by external force, whilst their internal forces sprung them asunder--a unity without internal union. But even as the wonderful agencies revealed to modern chemistry effect, in a short hour, the progresses which nature silently elaborates during a long growth of time, so in like manner did the energies of civilization effect in three years that dissolution for which, in the analogous precedent, seven generations were required." THE DECORATIVE ARTS IN AMERICA.