But Those Were Days When Honour Rather Than Disgrace Attached To The Ideas Of Booty And Plunder, Especially In An

Enemy's country; it was a "spoiling of the Egyptians" sanctioned by custom, and even permitted by the Church, which did

Not disdain occasionally to share in the profits of a successful cruise, when presented in the decent form of silver candlesticks and other ecclesiastical gauds. As to the ancient historian, he mentions these matters as a thing of course. "Here the King landed, burnt, and ravaged;" "there the Jarl gained much booty;" "this summer, they took a cruise in the Baltic, to gather property," etc., much as a modern biographer would speak of a gentleman's successful railroad speculations, his taking shares in a coal mine, or coming into a "nice little thing in the Long Annuities." Nevertheless, there is something significant of his future vocation, in a speech which Olaf makes to his assembled friends and relations, imparting to them his design of endeavouring to regain possession of the throne: "I and my men have nothing for our support save what we captured in war, FOR WHICH WE HAVE HAZARDED BOTH LIFE AND SOUL; for many an innocent man have we deprived of his property, and some of their lives, and foreigners are now sitting in the possessions of my fathers." One sees here a faint glimmer of the Saint's nimbus, over the helmet of the Viking, a dawning perception of the "rights of property," which, no doubt, must have startled his hearers into the most ardent conservative zeal for the good old marauding customs.

But though years elapsed, and fortunes changed, before this dim light of the early Church became that scorching and devouring flame which, later, spread terror and confusion among the haunts of the still lingering ancient gods, an earnest sense of duty seems to have been ever present with him. If it cannot be denied that he shared the errors of other proselytizing monarchs, and put down Paganism with a stern and bloody hand, no merely personal injury ever weighed with him. How grand is his reply to those who advise him to ravage with fire and sword the rebellious district of Throndhjem, as he had formerly punished numbers of his subjects who had rejected Christianity: - "We had then GOD'S honour to defend; but this treason against their sovereign is a much less grievous crime; it is more in my power to spare those who have dealt ill with me, than those whom God hated." The same hard measure which he meted to others he applied to his own actions: witness that curiously characteristic scene, when, sitting in his high seat, at table, lost in thought, he begins unconsciously to cut splinters from a piece of fir-wood which he held in his hand. The table servant, seeing what the King was about, says to him, (mark the respectful periphrasis!) "IT IS MONDAY, SIRE, TO-MORROW." The King looks at him, and it came into his mind what he was doing on a Sunday.

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