There was no limit to his interests, and he brought in a high conception of duty. Up to the close of his life nothing was too small to escape his personal supervision; he kept count of the chickens on his personal estates, dictated his capitularies, and learned the art of writing, a rare accomplishment, and deemed among the Teutonic races the special work of a cleric. He presided over assemblies and councils, ordered the system of chanting in his private chapel, and hardly a year passed by that he did not visit one of the frontiers of the Empire. His mental capacity was characterized by something of the mobility which belonged to the Renaissance period, a trait not seen among medieval rulers, and perhaps paralleled only in the case of Frederick II. His talents were not employed towards futile ends; he economized them, and while he was open to impressions, he kept with scrupulousness his store of energy under control. He was free from Napoleon’s defect of fitting all things as parts of a rigid system, and he knew when to keep his hands from disarranging a firmly established social order. It may be that a larger measure of interference from him would have prevented the growth of feudal privileges which the land system of Western Europe was already producing. This evolution he did not oppose; in some cases his own acts furthered it. The court and “missi” under his direction became, as it were, observers and directors of a naturally developing type of local administration which the general ordinances of the Empire did nothing to repress. Feudal customs, still, of course, in their germ, were pressed into the service of the state, as for example when the lord was required to appear accompanied by his dependents at the general military assembly of the King. The Emperor was quick in reconciling local divergencies, and in discerning some easily practicable method of making seemingly irreconcilable factors contribute mutually to his ends. When a governmental order failed, he was fertile in discerning an immediate remedy, careless whether the innovation of a reform could be theoretically accommodated to the administration as it before existed. Wherever the structure he planned turned out faulty, he went to work with the spirit of an artist who thinks more of the safety of the whole building than of the harmony of its parts. His ideal of rule was always before him, yet there was none of the stage effect of which Napoleon was so fond. He did not try to impress upon others principles that did not attract his own sympathies. He believed in what he did and believed the way he was doing it was consistent with his own ideals of right, personal and social. The empire was to be a community guided by Christian standards, a visible embodiment of the City of God, as understood in his day.