He paid great attention to astronomy.

Being troubled one day at no longer seeing in the firmament one of the known planets, he wrote to Alcuin, "What thinkest thou of this Mars, which, last year, being concealed in the sign of Cancer, was intercepted from the sight of men by the light of the sun?
Is it the regular course of his revolution?
Is it the influence of the sun?
Is it a miracle?
Could he have been two years about performing the course of a single one ?" In theological studies and discussions he exhibited a particular and grave interest.

"It is to him," say M.M.
Ampere and Haureau, "that we must refer the honor of the decision taken in 794 by the Council of Frankfort in the great dispute about images; a temperate decision which is as far removed from the infatuation of the image-worshippers as from the frenzy of the image-breakers." And at the same time that he thus took part in the great ecclesiastical questions, Charlemagne paid zealous attention to the instruction of the clergy, whose ignorance he deplored.

"Ah," said he one day, "if only I had about me a dozen clerics learned in all the sciences, as Jerome and Augustin were!" With all his puissance it was not in his power to make Jeromes and Augustins; but he laid the foundation, in the cathedral churches and the great monasteries, of episcopal and cloistral schools for the education of ecclesiastics, and carrying his solicitude still farther, he recommended to the bishops and abbots that, in those schools, "they should take care to make no difference between the sons of serfs and of free men, so that they might come and sit on the same benches to study grammar, music, and arithmetic." (_Capitularies_ of 789, art.

70.) Thus, in the eighth century, he foreshadowed the extension which, in the nineteenth, was to be accorded to primary instruction, to the advantage and honor not only of the clergy, but also of the whole people.
After so much of war and toil at a distance, Charlemagne was now at Aix- la-Chapelle, finding rest in this work of peaceful civilization.