stand our language. It will recall to memory an epoch which has more than one feature of resemblance with the present times. It will remind us of a warrior the most indefatigable and skilful; a man distinguished for his personal qualities, in whom the military virtues are united with a love of the arts and sciences; who honours philosophers, and receives pleasure in being surrounded by them; a conqueror who, not content with extending the boundaries of his empire, devotes his time. to the establishment of good laws, and salutary institutions; an enlightened christian, who knows at the same time how to respect and to restrain the ministers of worship; the chief of a new dynasty to which he has given his name, and which commences with the greatest éclat; a prince who governs by himself, and who is equally capable of directing the mass, and at the same time of watching over all the details, of a vast empire; a sovereign who, in showing himself at once the son and the protector of the church, thought it his duty to consecrate his title to a crown of which he was so worthy, by the intervention of a revered hand; who gives law to Italy and to a great part of Germany; to whom rivers and chains of mountains oppose but feeble barriers; who makes civil discord cease; at whose feet conspiracies expire; who assembles beneath his sceptre twenty nations, differing in language, in customs, and usages; a hero in a word, who, after having been the terror of his enemies, the director of those states by which his own are surrounded, the regenerator of his country, the model of cotemporary kings, remains an object of admiration. to all posterity.' Whoever knows (and who is there that is ignorant of?) the history of this mighty man, knows also the means by which he gained the crown; we know

nor

That, to possess the crown, laws divine
Nor human stopt his way;'

and we know too, that, like a tyrant of our own country in former days, he is regardless of the opinion of posterity:

6

They can't but say I had the crown;

I was not fool as well as villain.'

But on this threadbare subject it would be idle to dilate: we hasten to lay before our readers a brief account of this translation; which we are assured, and with reason, is not at all a literal and servile copy, but that it has been francisé, a term expressive of any thing rendered frivolous or trifling. The translator has taken the liberty of enlarging upon some ideas upon which his original, in his opinion, had not been sufficiently copious; he has suppressed some passages which might

have clashed with certain opinions, and omitted the notes. which were not interesting to Frenchmen: some he has incorporated with the text; and, in compliance with the taste of the frivolity of Paris, he has disentangled his work from that load of erudition which startles the idleness, and fatigues the patience, of his countrymen in general: and after using his pruning-knife with so liberal a hand, with all the vanity and assurance of his nation he exclaims, Ceux qui la liront, et l'auteur lui-même, nous le pardonneront sans doute.' This to Frenchmen may be a venial fault; but in our eyes, who prefer erudition to flippancy, and would rather see a literal translation from the works of the learned German professor, than the one now before us, it is a complaisance to a vitiated taste not easily to be forgiven: the cause however is not difficult to be conjectured; and we must at least commend the discretion of the translator, who knew too well the nature of the government under which he lives, the character of the person at the head of that government, and the summary inauner in which his commands are put in execution, to adorn his work with important but dangerous truths. We shall give a short sketch of the character of Charlemagne, as we find it in the work before us.

Active and enterprising, but endowed with great foresight, and possessing the soundest judgment, this emperor acted continually upon plans the most extensive, yet sure. Greedy of glory, beyond perhaps any other great man, he yet was not so rash as to court extraordinary adventures from the sole desire of extending his reputation. His love of glory was ennobled by the greatness of the objects which he aspired to accomplish. His genius, his knowledge of history, the sight of the ancient monuments of the Romans, the comparison which he made between their country the most brilliant period of their history and his own, taught him what a powerful, enlightened, and civilized nation could achieve, and inspired him with the desire of realizing the project he had formed.

A monarch endued with the genius of Charlemagne cannot fail to produce great revolutions both in the fashion of thinking, and in the manners of men; and if at the same time he' is animated with the noble intentions which directed that great prince, these revolutions cannot but be for the benefit of mankind. If he adds to these advantages the good-fortune of appearing at a time when he finds every thing prepared to facilitate the execution of his great designs, let him with a feeling of modesty cast his eyes on Charlemagne, who had to struggle against every obstacle to the perfecting of the human species. During his life, Charlemagne was often called a great king,' even by foreign nations. After having received APP. Vol. 4.

LI

the imperial dignity, in his public edicts, amongst other titles he styled himself grand empereur; but it was only in imitation of the court of Constantinople, where a multiplicity of pompous titles was introduced in proportion as the real strength of the eastern empire declined. It was after his death that he obtained the surname of Carolus Magnus, from which the French have formed the word Charlemagne, the only name by which he has been known for many ages.

Charlemagne was tall and athletic; he had the air of ma jesty, yet withal serene: formed for bodily exercises, he was a great lover of hunting, and took peculiar delight in swimming and riding: his table and his dress were models of simplicity; yet on solemn occasions hedisplayed in both an imperial magnificence; in public edifices, particularly in churches, he aimed at grandeur. During his repasts he generally read some historical narrative; and received great entertainment from the perusal of St. Austin's work on the City of God.

Charlemagne was married four times: his first wife was a Lombard princess; his second a lady of distinguished family in Suabia; his third a lady from the west of France; and his fourth a daughter of a German nobleman. He had children only by the second and third: by Hildegarde, three sons and three daughters; by the third, two daughters. Before he married his first wife, he lived with a woman of inferior rank. After the death of Lutgarde, his fourth wife, which happened anno 800, he formed several similar connections. Were these only unequal marriages, or were they in reality concubines? This is a point on which cotemporary historians are not suffi ciently clear. Their successors however have made up their silence, and have often spoken with confidence of the mistresses of Charlemagne. This monarch made the education of his children one of his most important occupations. He instructed his sons, and even his daughters, in the sciences, which he himself had begun to cultivate at a very advanced period of life. He was not singular in requiring his daughters to weave and to spin: but therein conformed to the general manners of the Germans, who retained them long after his reign, and who had the Romans aud Greeks for their model. The more de[licate employments becoming the fair sex who have received a refined education, were not yet invented. Ignorance often turns into ridicule what a learned man considers as the characteristic traits of a peculiar age or nation. His inclination to and constancy in friendship, his sensibility, are exalted by Eginhard, who had opportunities of personally applauding them. Queen Fastrade, his third wife, sometimes forced him to the perpetration of acts which one would not expect from

a character like his, distinguished by a sweet and amiable disposition with these rare exceptions, if we give credit to the unsuspected testimony of Eginhard, he merited and obtained the affection and esteem of all ranks of society.-Tame and insipid indeed is the portrait here delineated: and the translator seems to have been aware of it; for he has extracted in a supplement the character of Charlemagne as drawn by the most eminent historians, both English and French, and rather unluckily has placed that of Voltaire the last: whether he has done this by design or by chance, is a fact which we cannot decide.

ART. XII.-Poesias de el Dr. D. Juan Melendez Valdos. Poems, by Don John Melendez, LL. D. one of his Majesty's Counsellors, and Judge in the Court of Chancery of Valladolid. A new Edition, with Additions. 3 Vols. 8vo. Valladolid. THE history of literature, developes the progress of the human mind; that of language pourtrays the genius of a particular race or nation: from an intimate knowledge of the latter we become acquainted with the local modes of action of the thinking powers, and are thus enabled, by knowing what a nation has been,in some measure to pronounce what it will be. The inquiry is important, and well worthy the attention of the gravest statesman. To the negociator it seems an indispensable prerequisite; to the metaphysician it offers a safe and unbeaten path to the sources of human knowledge, and to the moralist those new analogies and sympathies which are not unfrequently the predisposing cause of virtue or vice. We must leave, how ever, the inference and practical utility of such researches, to attend to facts as they appear in a view of the origin, progress, and actual state, of the Spanish language. It may be observed, that from the conclusion of the peace between the Roman empire and Spain, effected by Augustus, the Latin language became, by means of rewards and disfranchises, the vernacular dialect of this western peninsula of Europe, and gradually extirpated that of the Grecians and Carthaginians. As to the language of the ancient and partly unconquered Cantabrians or the modern Biscayans, it is a subject foreign from our inquiry. The Latin continued gaining as much in extension as it was losing in purity, until the end of the fifth and sixth centuries, when the Goths and Vandals overran that country. These barbarians, although they published their laws in Latin, and attempted to adopt it for their own language, yet seem to have been incapable of expressing their thoughts in the laconic Lla

style of the Romans, and consequently had recourse to the alternative of prefixing prepositions to the names of things: hence probably the reason of modern Spanish nouns being generally Latin ablative cases.. In this unsocial state of im perfect communication, those once warlike barbarians, then somewhat domesticated, remained till the invasion of, the Moors, who obliged them to seek refuge in the mountains. Thus driven from plains of the most abundant fertility to shelter themselves amongst wild and barren rocks, the neces sities of animal existence awakened the hitherto dormant engrgies of the human mind, and the exigencies of their mutual support and defence contributed to establish that social intercourse which success and luxury had failed to accomplish. As their wants impelled and instructed them, their ferocity softened into heroism; and they sallied from the mountains of the Asturias, and again possessed themselves of the fertile valleys of Leon, Navarre, Arragon, and Castille. Thus, it may be observed, as Montesquieu has said of the British constitution, that this noble language was formed in the mountains. The language of the christians extended with their conquests; but there remains no specimen of it in writing before the time of Alfonso (or Alonzo) the Great, who, pronouncing it capable of every purpose of law and philosophy, ordered all the fueras (charters and privileges of the hewly conquered towns and places) to be written in this language. This truly great and philosophical prince also caused the fuero juzgo (a code of laws instituted by the Gothic kings) to be translated into the vulgar tongue in the end of the tenth or beginning of the eleventh century. From this period till the glorious reign of Ferdinand and Isabel, which the Spaniards esteem the Augustan age of their country, the power and the language of Spain became more and more distinguished in Europe, while the discoveries of Columbus extended them to a new world. As to the language, it was more copious than correct ; and the establishment of the inquisition constitutes an epocha no less in the literature than in the government and religion of Spain. Hitherto the language had only acquired copiousness from the Latin, with the addition of many Arabic, Greek, and Punic words; but was strikingly disfigured by a heterogeneous and extravagant phraseology borrowed from the Moors, and bordering on Orientalism, while it was almost wholly destitute of definiteness, logical precision, and natural propriety. From this strange mixture of Roman words with Arabic phraseology, sprung those romances which have ever since occupied the attention of the idle and fantastic. Such was the infatuation for bombastic and hyperbolical language, that in the vast collection of