The energy of Charlemagne as a warrior and a politician having thus been exhibited, it remains to say a few words about his intellectual energy.  For that is by no means the least original or least grand feature of his character and his influence.

Modern times and civilized society have more than once seen despotic sovereigns filled with distrust toward scholars of exalted intellect, especially such as cultivated the moral and political sciences, and little inclined to admit them to their favor or to public office.  There is no knowing whether, in our days, with our freedom of thought and of the press, Charlemagne would have been a stranger to this feeling of antipathy; but what is certain is that in his day, in the midst of a barbaric society, there was no inducement to it, and that, by nature, he was not disposed to it.  His power was not in any respect questioned; distinguished intellects were very rare; Charlemagne had too much need of their services to fear their criticisms, and they, on their part, were more anxious to second his efforts than to show, toward him, anything like exaction or independence.  He gave rein, therefore, without any embarrassment or misgiving, to his spontaneous inclination toward them, their studies, their labors, and their influence.  He drew them into the management of affairs.  In Guizot’s History of Civilization in France there is a list of the names and works of twenty-three men of the eighth and ninth centuries who have escaped oblivion, and they are all found grouped about Charlemagne as his own habitual advisers, or assigned by him as advisers to his sons Pepin and Louis in Italy and Aquitaine, or sent by him to all points of his empire as his commissioners, or charged in his name with important negotiations.  And those whom he did not employ at a distance formed, in his immediate neighborhood, a learned and industrious society, a school of the palace, according to some modern commentators, but an academy and not a school, according to others, devoted rather to conversation than to teaching.

It probably fulfilled both missions; it attended Charlemagne at his various residences, at one time working for him at questions he invited them to deal with, at another giving to the regular components of his court, to his children, and to himself lessons in the different sciences called liberal:  grammar, rhetoric, logic, astronomy, geometry, and even theology, and the great religious problems it was beginning to discuss.  Two men, Alcuin and Eginhard, have remained justly celebrated in the literary history of the age.  Alcuin was the principal director of the school of the palace, and the favorite, the confidant, the learned adviser of Charlemagne.  “If your zeal were imitated,” said he one day to the Emperor, “perchance one might see arise in France a new Athens, far more glorious than the ancient—­the Athens of Christ.”