The whole life of Charles of Denmark is wrapped and swathed from beginning to end in mystery and contradiction. Half soldier, half saint, with his Bible in one hand, and Charlemagne's sword 'Joyeuse' in the other, he flits across the stage of European history like some pale, crimson-robed phantom from another world.[10] Was he a cunning schemer--a layer of deep plots which he never lived to carry out, or was he only a dreamer of dreams, tossed about by wayward impulses and passing fancies, this incomprehensible Dane, king's son or scullion's son, as the case may be, who almost accomplished so much and in reality achieved so little--this tissue of inconsistencies who usurped for himself a petty principality and despised an imperial diadem, who crushed his proud lords with a lion's fierceness, and went barefoot to kiss the hands of beggars, this most marvellous devotee who showed himself on occasions so generous and at times appears so mean, who deprived himself of meat and raiment that he might have the more to succour the needy, and spat on his best friends and trampled them in the dust? This friend and father of churches, who all his life long lavished on them wealth, honour, obedience, and whose end, by a strange irony of fate, was at length destined to be the outcome of an unjust quarrel which he himself had forced on his own ecclesiastical chief. Questions difficult to answer these, with the evidence at present at our disposal. Dr. Wegener thinks (p. 6) there is ground for believing that the dream of Charles's life was to win his paternal heritage--the crown of Denmark, and that if he had lived longer he might perhaps have realized it. May be his hopes flew higher still, and that the ultimate goal of his ambition was to carry out his father's darling project and establish once more, in all its glory, the kingdom of Canute the Great. But, however this may be, and whatever may have been Charles's failings and his foibles and his faults, one thing is certain: his good deeds alone followed him. The hospitals and asylums which he founded, the churches and monasteries which he built, his courtesy and sweetness to the poor and the simple, the sympathy and protection which he showed to the oppressed, the lordly feasts which he made in his palace at Bruges for the blind and the halt and the maimed--these are the things which lived after him, and friend and foe alike agreed to forget the rest.