a few years before the death of our own Henry II.; but
detailed by the old Sagaman with so much art and cleverness
as almost to combine the dramatic power of Macaulay with
Clarendon's delicate delineation of character, and the
charming loquacity of Mr. Pepys. His stirring sea-fights,
his tender love-stories, and delightful bits of domestic
gossip, are really inimitable;--you actually live with
the people he brings upon the stage, as intimately as
you do with Falstaff, Percy, or Prince Hal; and there is
something in the bearing of those old heroic figures who
form his dramatis person, so grand and noble, that it is
impossible to read the story of their earnest stirring
lives without a feeling of almost passionate interest--an
effect which no tale frozen up in the monkish Latin of
the Saxon annalists has ever produced upon me.

As for Snorro's own life, it was eventful and tragic
enough. Unscrupulous, turbulent, greedy of money, he
married two heiresses--the one, however, becoming the
COLLEAGUE, not the successor of the other. This arrangement
naturally led to embarrassment. His wealth created envy,
his excessive haughtiness disgusted his sturdy
fellow-countrymen. He was suspected of desiring to make
the republic an appanage of the Norwegian crown, in the
hope of himself becoming viceroy; and at last, on a dark
September night, of the year 1241, he was murdered in
his house at Reikholt by his three sons-in-law.

The same century which produced the Herodotean work of
Sturleson also gave birth to a whole body of miscellaneous