that day. Olaf or "Olaus," or "Anlaf," as they name him, did "engage
on oath to Ethelred not to invade England any more," and kept his
promise, they farther say. Essentially a truth, as we already know,
though the circumstances were all different; and the promise was to a
devout High Priest, not to a crowned Blockhead and cowardly
Do-nothing. One other "Olaus" I find mentioned in our Books, two or
three centuries before, at a time when there existed no such
individual; not to speak of several Anlafs, who sometimes seem to mean
Olaf and still oftener to mean nobody possible. Which occasions not a
little obscurity in our early History, says the learned Selden. A
thing remediable, too, in which, if any Englishman of due genius (or
even capacity for standing labor), who understood the Icelandic and
Anglo-Saxon languages, would engage in it, he might do a great deal of
good, and bring the matter into a comparatively lucid state. Vain
aspirations,--or perhaps not altogether vain.

At the time of Olaf Tryggveson's death, and indeed long before, King
Svein Double-Beard had always for chief enterprise the Conquest of
England, and followed it by fits with extreme violence and impetus;
often advancing largely towards a successful conclusion; but never,
for thirteen years yet, getting it concluded. He possessed long since
all England north of Watling Street. That is to say, Northumberland,
East Anglia (naturally full of Danish settlers by this time), were
fixedly his; Mercia, his oftener than not; Wessex itself, with all the
coasts, he was free to visit, and to burn and rob in at discretion.
There or elsewhere, Ethelred the Unready had no battle in him
whatever; and, for a forty years after the beginning of his reign,
England excelled in anarchic stupidity, murderous devastation, utter
misery, platitude, and sluggish contemptibility, all the countries one
has read of. Apparently a very opulent country, too; a ready skill in