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 Icelandic literature, - though in Britain and elsewhere bookmaking was entirely confined to the monks, and merely consisted in the compilation of a series of bald annals locked up in bad Latin. It is true, Thomas of Ercildoune was a contemporary of Snorro's; but he is known to us more as a magician than as a man of letters; whereas histories, memoirs, romances, biographies, poetry, statistics, novels, calendars, specimens of almost every kind of composition, are to be found even among the meagre relics which have survived the literary decadence that supervened on the extinction of the republic.

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