enjoy, touch but the edges of it, there is poyson in both of them, it is
a most cruell devourer of men.

_Hervor_.--I shall keep, and take in hand, the sharp sword which thou
hast let me have: I do not fear, O slain father! what my sons hereafter
may quarrell about.... Dwell all of you safe in the tombe, I must be
gon, and hasten hence, for I seem to be, in the midst of a place where
fire burns round about me.

One can well understand, who handles the ponderous _Thesaurus_, why the
first English lovers of Old Norse were antiquarians. "The Awakening of
Angantyr" is literally buried in this work, and only the student of
Anglo-Saxon prosody would come upon it unassisted, since it is an
illustration in a chapter of the _Grammaticæ Anglo-Saxonicæ et
Moeso-Gothicæ_. Students will remember in this connection that it was
a work on poetics that saved for us the original Icelandic _Edda_. The
Icelandic skald had to know his nation's mythology.


THOMAS PERCY (1729-1811).

The title of Chapter XXIII in Hickes' work indicates that even among
learned doctors mistaken notions existed as to the relationship of the
Teutonic languages. It took more than a hundred years to set the error
right, but in the meanwhile the literature of Iceland was becoming
better known to English readers. To the French scholar, Paul Henri
Mallet (1730-1807), Europe owes the first popular presentation of
Northern antiquities and literature. Appointed professor of
belles-lettres in the Copenhagen academy he found himself with more time
than students on his hands, because not many Danes at that time