shreed of scarlet, or a little darker, like the lees of old claret wine; ... upon his fingers as many gold rings, as would furnish a goldsmiths shop. . . let mee come to him with a pawn worth ten pound, he will not lend upon it above three pound, and he will have a bill of saile and twelve pence in the pound for every month, so that it comes to sixteen pence, sith the bill must monthly be renued, and if you breake but your day set doune in the bill of saile, your pawne is lost...; suppose yt best, you keep your day, yet paying sixteen pence a month for twenty shillings; you pay as good for the lone as fower score in the hundred: Such brokers extort upon the poare that are inforced through extreme want to pawn their cloathes and household stuffe, their pewter and brasse; . . . I have knowne of late when a poore woman laid a silver thimble . to pawn for six pence, the broker made her pay half penny a week for it, which came to two shillings a yere, for six pence.' Henry Chettle in Kind-Harts Dreame gives the same rates.2

"1

By 1678 the rates and charges seem even to have increased. In an anonymous pamphlet entitled Four for a Penny: or Poor Robin's Character of an Unconscionable Pawn-Broker, etc., the victims are described as coming into the shop: "like other prisoners, they first pay garnish, the two pences for entrance-money: after this six pence a month for every twenty shillings lent, which yet indeed is but nineteen shillings and six-pence; that is, according to their reckoning of thirteen months to the year; which makes thirty-three pounds, six shillings, and eighteen pence in the hundred; . . . besides twelve pence for a bill of sale, if the matter be considerable." 3

...

In addition to the profits made through charges and the forfeiture of pawns, these brokers received some income from the renting of the pawns before they were redeemed. Frippery, in Middleton's Your Five Gallants, rents to a bawd suits for his women at twelve pence a day. Fitzdotterel, in Jonson's The Devil is an Ass, rents clothes of the broker, Engine, for gala occasions. Wittipol says: "Engine gets three or four pounds a week by him." 5 We have seen, if Frippery's word is to be trusted, that most of the pawns were worth three times the value of the money lent on them. In the sale

of those forfeited, therefore, there must also have been large profit. A still greater profit was probably realized from the buying and selling of stolen goods. There are numerous references to the pawn-brokers as receivers of such ware.1 In fact it was to remedy only this abuse that the "Act against Brokers" (1603-4) was passed.

To quote the words of the author of The Defence of ConnyCatching, which was a protest against Greene's having spent so much time on "coney-catchers" and having allowed more dangerous "thieves," such as usurers and brokers, to go unmentioned: "It were an endless peace of work, to discover the abominable life of brokers, whose shops are the very temples of the devil." Only one more detail of this life can be given, and that is the manner in which they were frequently accused of investing their ill-gotten gains. The broker that Greene described so circumstantially had "interest in the leases of forty baudy houses." 2

This disagreeable detail must close the account of

The sonnes of Mammon, money-monger slaves,

With bribing Scriveners, and with broking knaves."

See the Defence of Conny-catching, Grosart's Greene, XI, 78; Greene's Quip, etc., ibid., XI, 243, stolen verbatim by Rowlands in his Martin Mark-All, p. 14, Hunterian Club; and Dekker's Jests to Make You Merie, Huth Library, II, 335.

2

A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, Grosart's Greene, XI, 343.

Samuel Rowland's The Divell, and the Usurer, of A Paire of Spy Knaves, Hunterian Club, p. 14.

T

THE POETRY OF VIKTOR RYDBERG

CHARLES WHARTON STORK

HE salient quality of Swedish poetry is its nationalism. Not only is the patriotic verse of Sweden unusually vital, but there

is a rich autochthonous flavor in nearly all the narrative and descriptive pieces. Indeed this virtue, combined as it is with finished artistry of form, constitutes the chief attraction of Swedish poetry for the foreigner. We cannot read long without detecting a Hesiodic charm, a closeness to the soil and the traditions of the soil. We may be reminded in turn of Theocritus, of Burns, of Beranger, or of Mörike, but always with a difference. It is not of the earth in general but of his native earth in particular that the Swedish poet sings, thus exhibiting an originality of the soundest sort. We feel that from this poetry we are getting a pleasure which could not possibly be found elsewhere.

In the splendid array of poets in modern Swedish literature, which dates from about 1750, nine men stand out strongly as of the first rank: namely, Bellman, Tegnér, Runeberg, Rydberg, Snoilsky, Fröding, Levertin, Heidenstam and Karlfeldt, of whom the last two are still living. Among these only two could conceivably have developed elsewhere than in Sweden and Finland. Oskar Levertin, with his Jewish extraction, with his almost morbid love of beauty. as an end in itself, is a natural exception. He is a mystic, a typical poet of the ivory tower. More powerful, more human, more interesting in every way is Viktor Rydberg.

Rydberg is the seer of Swedish poetry. He is not in any sense un-Swedish, but his philosophic mind and lofty spirit carry him beyond his native land into the realm of human brotherhood and of pure ideas. He is neo-classic, like Goethe and Arnold; cosmic, utopian and visionary, like Eschylus and Shelley. He fuses Biblical with classic tradition as does Milton, and he shows at times the influence of Poe in his love of lyric melody. He is thus both an eclectic and a citizen in the world of ideal poetry. With a few

notable exceptions, his Swedish extraction appears only in his imagery, which abounds in figures of the sea and of storm. His spirit is Teutonic but not peculiarly Scandinavian.

Rydberg's life can be but indistinctly divined from his poetry. His clear philosophic tone might lead us to infer that, like Arnold, he inherited fine traditions of culture, and, like Goethe, enjoyed the privileges of a fine education without any preliminary struggle. The exact opposite was the case. We shall, however, be right when we infer, from his long imaginative flights, that he was a man of lonely, sensitive temperament. Like Poe, he thought of life as a mysterious riddle and pictured certain demonic forces at work against the divine in man's nature; but morbidness, though occasional with him, did not prevail in his life or his philosophy of life. It is evident, then, that the idealism of Rydberg is of an unusual and somewhat complex nature. Though his life will not explain his art, we could not account for certain important phases of Rydberg's poetry without knowing something of the man.

Viktor Rydberg (born in 1828) was the son of a prison warden. The influence of his mother and of nature offset the pressure of extreme poverty. His early life was a brave and successful struggle to obtain an education. In 1851 he entered the University of Lund, but was obliged to break off his studies for a time and earn his livelihood by tutoring. At this point a patron came to his rescue and saved him from going to America as an engineer by giving him a position in a newspaper office. His work left him time for literary activity, and he soon manifested his gift by producing three historical novels which retain their popularity to the present day.

The third of these, The Last Athenian, which appeared in 1859, is frequently ranked as the greatest novel in Swedish. It is typical in many ways of Rydberg's breadth and fairness of view. NeoPlatonism is contrasted with a phase of early Christianity, somewhat to the advantage of the former. Nevertheless, the chief Christian in the story is portrayed with sympathy. In style The Last Athenian is very noble and beautiful, so much so as to be termed by some critics a prose poem. This is very natural, as the romance is, despite its lively narrative interest, rather one of ideas than of incidents.

Rydberg now undertook with more freedom and confidence the study of religion in history. The writings which resulted from this embody, as we might expect, a seeking for the spirit of Christianity