Thursday 25 June 2009

cuppy! cuppy!

I will admit that I was a little disappointed when I started reading The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody. I will also admit that I was wrong. Here's Cuppy on Charlemagne:
Pippin the short died in 768, leaving his title jointly to Charles and Carloman, a younger son who soon died suddenly, although he had never been sick a day in his life.

By this time Charles was twenty-nine and billed as almost too good for this world, a reputation that has persisted to our own day and is pretty sure to last forever. He was so wonderful as soldier, statesman, moralist, reformer, and what not that it would be awful to suggest that there was anything wrong with Carloman's death. The same goes for the passing of Carloman's two little sons when their mother tried to make trouble. It seemed to run in the family.*
...
Most historians say that Charlemagne was neither German nor French, but Frankish. He was German.


*The most I will say is that I feel a little uneasy about it. Gibbon did too.

And here he is on some peoples:
The Ostrogoths and the visigoths were so much alike that it was impossible for a layman to tell them apart, and, if you could, what would you do about the Asdings, the Silings, and the Gepids, not to mention the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, and the Lithuanians. Name three important exports of the Gepids. Name one.

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