praises of the historians and philosophers of an enlightened age.
^95 His real merit is doubtless enhanced by the barbarism of the
nation and the times from which he emerged: but the apparent
magnitude of an object is likewise enlarged by an unequal
comparison; and the ruins of Palmyra derive a casual splendor
from the nakedness of the surrounding desert. Without injustice
to his fame, I may discern some blemishes in the sanctity and
greatness of the restorer of the Western empire. Of his moral
virtues, chastity is not the most conspicuous: ^96 but the public
happiness could not be materially injured by his nine wives or
concubines, the various indulgence of meaner or more transient
amours, the multitude of his bastards whom he bestowed on the
church, and the long celibacy and licentious manners of his
daughters, ^97 whom the father was suspected of loving with too
fond a passion. ^* I shall be scarcely permitted to accuse the
ambition of a conqueror; but in a day of equal retribution, the
sons of his brother Carloman, the Merovingian princes of
Aquitain, and the four thousand five hundred Saxons who were
beheaded on the same spot, would have something to allege against
the justice and humanity of Charlemagne. His treatment of the
vanquished Saxons ^98 was an abuse of the right of conquest; his
laws were not less sanguinary than his arms, and in the
discussion of his motives, whatever is subtracted from bigotry
must be imputed to temper. The sedentary reader is amazed by his
incessant activity of mind and body; and his subjects and enemies
were not less astonished at his sudden presence, at the moment
when they believed him at the most distant extremity of the
empire; neither peace nor war, nor summer nor winter, were a
season of repose; and our fancy cannot easily reconcile the
annals of his reign with the geography of his expeditions. ^! But