in enervating nocturnal cogitation:

An unwise man lies all night awake, Tossing about in restless thoughts. Wretched he is when the morning breaks;

Then wailing begins once more.

Strange as it may seem, the energetic individualism of the Teutons reconciled itself to a fatalistic creed, which however did not hinder them from living a life of tumultuous action. "All is laid down beforehand" (lagt er alt fyrir), says Sigurd undaunted, when he consults the seer Gripir as to the struggles which await him. And in leaving Gripir, the bold. warrior again exclaims :-" Farewell! Fate cannot be withstood!" The inevitable concatenation of events strongly struck our forefathers' fancy. Yet their ever active will did not suffer from this belief-even as men now-a-days repeat doctrines of predestination, without forgetting to fight against dangers that approach them.

When Life's struggles are over, a respectful treatment-the Edda says-is to be given to the human remains. This is the Ninth Commandment of the re-awakened Walkyrian Maid:

For the ninth I tell thee: Take care of the Dead,

Wherever thou findest them in the field

Whether sickness felled them, or the

foundering ship,

Or whether a sword had smitten them. Let a mound be raised to their

memory:

Their heads and hands be washed first!

Combed and dried they shall come to the coffin.

Then do thou pray for their happy sleep!

By the Law of Odin-that is, of the semi-mythic, semi-historical chieftain of that name, who came from the shores of the Black Sea, through Germany, to Sweden-it was ordained that "the dead should be burnt," and that "for illustrious men a mound should be raised as a token of remembrance." Odin's Law further provided for the setting up of a stone-fence round the grave. Fireburial was the universal practice among the various Teutonic tribes. In Germany it was kept up among the Thuringians and Saxons, down. to the seventh and eighth century. I have shewn elsewhere* that the reference to a "coffin," in the Ninth Commandment of Sigurdrifa, may be a later interpolation; betraying a Christian origin. But the general injunction to take care of the Dead, and to respect their memory, is undoubtedly of most ancient date, and gives proof of some delicacy of feeling among the heathen Teutons, even as among the Greeks of the heroic age.

On this subject of honour to the Dead, Tacitus has the following, with regard to the German

custom :

"There is no ambitious show in their funerals. The only distinction to be observed is, that the bodies of their leading men are burnt with a certain kind of wood. They cover the pile neither with garments, nor with incense; only the weapons, sometimes the horse, are added to the pyre. The funeral place is marked by a knoll of turf: they reject the honour of laboriously constructed heavy monuments, as if it were a burden upon the dead. Laments and

1875.

tears they soon give up; but grief and sorrow last long with them (dolorem et tristitiam tarde ponunt). For women it is meet to utter wails; for men, to keep up remembrance."

XV.

In the Háva-mál, from which the above Rules of Life are mainly drawn, Odin's Runic Song is included, which ends with these significant words:

Now are sung the High One's Songs
In the High One's Hall-
To the sons of men all useful;
But useless to the Giant-born.

Hail to him, who has sung them!
Hail to him, who knows them!
Long lives, who has learnt them.
Hail to all that hear them!

It seems to me that in this restrietion of the Ethic Code for the use of the sons of men-to the exclusion of the offspring of the Jötun, or Giants-the idea is laid down that the representatives of the primeval forces of Nature cannot be bound to a moral law-that in Mankind alone an ethic principle can be upheld.

If, now, we take a survey over the whole of the Eddic maxims, we are, first and foremost, struck by the fact of an utter absence of religious fanaticism as against nonbelievers in the Asa faith. Not a single passage curses any heretic. The Gods keep in the background; no priest appears with a malediction. A second remarkable point is, that the moral injunctions are preached without scarcely any allusion to rewards or punishments. The only vague mention of this kind occurs in a probably spurious

passage of the Völuspa, and in the Sigurdrifa Lay, where Truthfulness is held in such high esteem that it is said:"Mainswearing is followed by cruel fetters; accursed is the breaker of oaths." If it were not that Odin is distantly supposed to speak in the High One's Lay, we should not even see a trace, in these moral saws, of the Germanic Olympus. So far as ethics are preached, they are preached on the ground of simple Right and Duty, without theological admixture

any

In the Landnáma-bók, or Book of Colonisation, of Ari Thorgilsson (generally called Ari Frodi, or the Learned) we read that Thorkel Mani, an Icelandic heathen, had "led as virtuous a life as the best Christian." Ari himself was a Christian. His testimony is, therefore, of importance. Taking all in all, the impression we get from these indications of a system of Teutonic morality-so far as the written records that have fortunately survived the wreck of time and the destructive hand of bigotry, allow us to draw a conclusion-is certainly not an unfavourable one. A spirit of nobler humanity is seen struggling, in the Eddic precepts, against the more lawless passions of mankind. No impartial critic will refuse to acknowledge that, if longer time had been allowed for maturing maturing the sound germs of morality contained in that teaching, an ethic view and a philosophy of life might gradually have been evolved from them, not unlike the corresponding systems of the sages among the more cultured nations of classic antiquity.

COLERIDGE.

THE first man of any note in literature whom I ever saw was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was giving a series of lectures on the Belles Lettres in a large room on the first floor of a sixth-rate tavern at the end of a blind alley on the right hand side of Fetter Lane, not far from Fleet Street. The admission fee was five shillings, and I, a boy of some sixteen or seventeen, was taken by an uncle. I was struck by his wonderful forehead-full of power. He began with a few short sentences, but when he warmed to his subject his eloquence was almost overpowering in its volume and brilliancy. I well remember his remarking of one of the Greek poets, with reference to the simplicity of his language, that it was "such as a lamenting mother in a cottage might be supposed to have used." In classifying the various kinds of readers, he said some were like jelly bags-they let pass away all that is pure and good, and retained only what is impure and refuse. Another class he typified by a sponge; these were they whose minds sucked all up, and gave it back again, only a little dirtier. Others, again, he likened to an hour-glass, and their reading to the sand which runs in and runs out, and leaves no trace behind. I forget the fourth class, but the fifth and last

he compared to the slaves in the Golconda mines, who retained the gold and the gem, and cast aside the dirt and the dross.

Among the auditors in that low tavern there were Daw, the painter, who afterwards went to Russia, and William Godwin, the author of "St. Leon" and "Caleb Williams "-one, I forget which, of them had a hooked nose, and though it was Christmas, wore nankeen pantaloons. There was also Edward Erasmus Phillips, who was clerk to Rickman, secretary to the Speaker, to which office he succeeded, and served Abbott (afterwards Lord Colchester), and Manners Sutton, son of the Archbishop, and afterwards Lord Canterbury. Phillips took his B.A. degree at Oxford at eighteen, and his M.A. before he was twentyone. He associated very much with the Lake school of poets, and used to say that Coleridge was wont to talk long and eloquently in society, but if he was interrupted, or, as he thought, not sufficiently attended to, he would go into a corner and turn his back to the company. Phillips told me that before Coleridge parted from his wife, he took her round to his most intimate friends, and bearing the highest testimony to her virtues as a wife and a woman, explained that there was between them a want of sympathy which rendered it impossible that they

could live happily together. I heard Coleridge lecture the same winter at the Surrey Institution, formerly the Leverean Museum, on the Surrey side of Blackfriars Bridge, where there was a very pretty theatre adapted to the purpose. I remember that he came on the stage eating an apple; and appeared a little hazy. He however quickly recovered himself.

WILLIAM ETTY, R. A. When I first knew Etty he was a pupil of Sir Thomas Lawrence, for whom he painted the draperies of the portraits of George III. and his Queen, which it was the custom, in those days, to send to foreign Courts. He then had rooms in Moorfields, by Finsbury Square, where many a time I have supped sumptuously on a threepenny loaf and a pint of porter. He thence removed to apartments in Bridge Street, Blackfriars, where I well. remember seeing a picture in the foreground of which was one of his landladies (they were two pretty milliners), while behind a tree in the back of the picture was a figure marvellously resembling the painter, whose physiognomy was very striking.

I

He afterwards removed to Buckingham Street, in the Strand, where I often visited him, and where, I believe, he died. remember once calling when he was painting the head of a boy, who was perched up on a box by his easel. I observed that when with one stroke of his brush he laid colour on the cheek, the eyes lit up as it were. I remarked this to Etty, who said "Ay, yes-the same effect is produced by rouge on the cheek of a pale woman." He had two little boys once as models, in their ordinary dress, who became very fidgety from time to time; and on each occasion

Etty went to a recess in his painting room, drew forth a bun, from a bag which he had provided, and breaking it in two, poked a half into the mouth of each, as if he were feeding a monkey. Etty was in the habit of "looking me up," as he called it, when a long interval had elapsed since we had met. On one occasion I asked him to come down and dine with me, which he did long past the hour fixed. He accounted for the delay by saying that he had reached the house some time before, but that he was tempted to stroll up a rural lane opposite, where he saw the sun shining through the leaves of some elms on the backs of some score of sheep, and he could not get away from the picture. On another occasion, he dined at our house, meeting Mr. Ruskin, then a very young man, David Roberts, Brockedon, and one or two other men of note. David had just come back from his Egyptian tour, and, the conversation turning on Mahommedanism, Roberts, who, though he took very readily the polish of the society to which his great talents had raised him, would occasionally grow emphatic, said, "My opinion is that that Mahomet was a gallows rascal. If for nothing else, I hate him for covering up the women-and you, Etty" (the great flesh painter of the day), "wouldn't like him for that." In the course of the evening Etty disappeared, but returning in about an hour accounted to me for his absence by saying he had "gone up that lane again." Could he have expected to find the picture still there of the sunlight and the leaves and the sheep? In person, he was below the middle height, rather stout, with a large head for his size, and was marked with the small-pox. Mr. Beckford, of Fonthill, told me

he thought Etty the finest colourist of his day. He was remarkably mild and amiable in his manners, constant in his friendships, and his mind was thoroughly embued with classic literature as derived from translation. He was, for years, a regular attendant at evensong in Westminster Abbey. I should have added to the anecdote of the divided bun, that when the need of a pocket-handkerchief became apparent in either of his juvenile sitters, Etty would go to the drawer, bring forth a checked duster, and pass it, solemnly, to and fro under the urchin's nose.

WILLIAM ALLEN, R.N., F.R.S.

I owe the acquaintance, and subsequent lifelong friendship, of this gallant and good man to an introduction from a dear friend, an officer stationed at Ascension, where Allen had been staying to recruit his health on his return from his first Niger exploration, on which he volunteered to accompany Richard Lander in 1832, and in which the latter was killed in a skirmish with the natives on the Quorra river. When he reached Ascension he was one of the nine survivors of the forty-seven who composed the expedition. He was prohibited, from some understanding between Mr. Laird and the Admiralty, from publishing his journal; which is much to be regretted, since (I speak from my own knowledge) it was far more interesting than that published of the subsequent exploration; the romance which surrounded the first being entirely destroyed in the second by the three men-ofwar steamers which composed the expedition. In the first expedition, although his purpose was to survey the Niger, he was only a passenger in the ship. From the circumstance of the vessel steaming against tide the natives took it for

a living creature, an impression which was confirmed by the quantity of wood which was cut for her and consumed by her. Nor was it deemed prudent to undeceive them. Two attempts were made to poison him by the native kings; once in a pot of honey, and again in some deer's flesh. One of their sable majesties offered him his two daughters in marriage, and he had some difficulty in gracefully declining the honour. The attempts to poison him put him on his guard, and when he dined with Royalty he took care to help himself from that portion of the dish from which his hosts fed. Thus in partaking of a banana pudding, he was careful, fingers being the natural substitutes for forks, to hook out his portion so as to leave the thinnest possible wall of pudding between his finger and the King's. Captain Allen's second expedition in the "Wilberforce," in the autumn of 1840, has been recorded in two volumes, the joint authorship of himself and Dr. Thomson. The expedition, made to establish a trade with the natives, was a complete failure. He was promoted to the rank of admiral on the 12th April, 1862. He was rather under the middle height, with very handsome features, frank and open in their expression, and beaming with benevolence and good humour. His character united, in a singular degree, the frankness of the sailor with the refinement of the gentleman. He was remarkable for his fondness for children, of whom he was the idol. He was a good musician, and clever artist, as several of his pictures exhibited at the Royal Academy proved. He published two oblong volumes of sketches of the Island of Ascension and of African scenery. He also published two volumes on the Dead Sea, which, as well as the