There can be little doubt that it was the influence of Roman and ecclesiastical ideas which tended to exalt the rude chiefs of the Salian tribe into their later position of practically despotic monarchs, surrounded by a crowd of fawning flatterers and servile courtiers. The effect of this exaltation on the royal house itself was disastrous. Merovingian royalty flowered too soon and faded early. Clovis himself was short-lived, dying, as we have seen, at the age of five-and-forty. But two or three generations later the career of the kings, his descendants, was of far more portentous brevity. Nothing is more common than to find a Merovingian king who is a father at fifteen, or even earlier, and who dies (not always by a violent death) under thirty. Let us take a few of the lives of the later kings as an illustration. Dagobert I., who is a sort of patriarch among them, dies at thirty-eight; his son, Clovis II., at twenty-four; of the sons of this latter king, Chlothair III. dies at eighteen, Childeric II. at twenty. Theodoric III. actually lives to the age of thirty-eight, but of his sons one dies at thirteen and another at eighteen. And so on with many other names that might be quoted. It was evidently by their vices that these hapless “do-nothing” kings were hurried to such early graves. Every student of the pages of Gregory of Tours[14] knows the dreary picture of morals and of social life which is there presented: the coarseness of the barbarian without his rough fidelity, the voluptuousness of the Gallo-Roman noble without his culture. Even as we see at the present day in the contact of two civilizations or of two faiths, notably in the contact of Christianity and Mohammedanism, that the men whose position places them on the borders of the two are apt to display the vices of both and the virtues of neither, so was it with the Frankish nobles and bishops of Gaul in the sixth and seventh centuries, and so emphatically was it with their head, the Frankish king who reigned at Metz or Orleans or Paris. Immersed in his swinish pleasures, with his constitution ruined by his early excesses, what could the sickly youth, the Childebert or Chlothair of the day, do to overtake the mass of business which the administration of the realm, with its highly centralized mechanism, imposed upon him? He could not do it all, and in practice he did nothing, and sank easily, perhaps happily, into the condition of a _roi fainéant_. Dagobert I., who died in 638, is the last Merovingian king who displays some royal energy and strength of purpose. After him for more than a century a series of pageant kings pass before us, Clovises and Theodorics and Chilperics, whose names history refuses to remember, but whose pitiable condition is represented to us by a few vivid touches from the hand of Einhard, the biographer of Charlemagne. He describes to us how the Merovingian king, seated in his chair of state, received the ambassadors of foreign