perseverance and fervour for culture of a single man, Bishop Urne.




SAXO AS A WRITER.

Saxo's countrymen have praised without stint his remarkable style, for
he has a style. It is often very bad; but he writes, he is not in
vain called Grammaticus, the man of letters. His style is not merely
remarkable considering its author's difficulties; it is capable at need
of pungency and of high expressiveness. His Latin is not that of the
Golden Age, but neither is it the common Latin of the Middle Ages. There
are traces of his having read Virgil and Cicero. But two writers in
particular left their mark on him. The first and most influential is
Valerius Maximus, the mannered author of the "Memorabilia", who lived in
the first half of the first century, and was much relished in the Middle
Ages. From him Saxo borrowed a multitude of phrases, sometimes apt but
often crabbed and deformed, as well as an exemplary and homiletic turn
of narrative. Other idioms, and perhaps the practice of interspersing
verses amid prose (though this also was a twelfth century Icelandic
practice), Saxo found in a fifth-century writer, Martianus Capella, the
pedantic author of the "De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii" Such models
may have saved him from a base mediaeval vocabulary; but they were not
worthy of him, and they must answer for some of his falsities of style.
These are apparent. His accumulation of empty and motley phrase, like a
garish bunch of coloured bladders; his joy in platitude and pomposity,
his proneness to say a little thing in great words, are only too easy
to translate. We shall be well content if our version also gives some
inkling of his qualities; not only of what Erasmus called his "wonderful