Suffrage ever yield us? Suffrage, I perceive well, has quite other things in store for us; we need not torment poor Suffrage for this thing! Our Intermittent Friend says once :

"Men do not seem to be aware that this their universal ousting of unjust, incapable, and, in fact, imaginary Governors, is to issue in the attainment of Governors who have a right and a capacity to govern. Far different from that is the issue men contemplate in their present revolutionary operations. Their universal notion now is, that we shall henceforth do without Governors; that we have got to a new epoch in human progress, in which Governing is entirely a superfluity, and the attempt at doing it is an offence, think several. By that admirable invention of the Constitutional Parliament, first struck out in England, and now at length hotly striven for and zealously imitated in all European countries, the task of Governing, any task there may still be, is done to our hand. Perfect your Parliament, cry all men apply the Ballot box and Universal Suffrage! the admirablest method ever imagined of counting heads and gathering indubitable votes: you will thus gather the vote, vox, or voice, of all the two-legged animals without feathers in your dominion; what they think is what the gods think,—is it not?—and this you shall go and do.

"Whereby, beyond dispute, your Governor's task is immensely simplified; and indeed the chief thing you can now require of your Governor is that he carefully preserves his good humour, and do in a handsome manner nothing, or some pleasant fugle motions only. Is not this a machine; marking new epochs in the progress of discovery? Machine for doing Government too, as we now do all things by machinery. Only keep your free presses, ballot boxes, upright shafts, and cogwork, in an oiled, unobstructed condition; motive power of popular wind will do the rest. Here, verily, is a mill that beats Birmingham hollow, and marks new epochs with a witness. What a hopper this! Reap from all fields whatsoever you find standing—thistledowns, dockseed, hemlockseed, wheat, rye; tumble all into the hopper, see in soft, blissful, continuous stream, meal shall daily issue for you, and the bread of life to mankind be sure!"

The aim of all reformers, parliamentary and other, is still defined by them as just legislation, just laws; with which definition who can quarrel? They will not have class legislation, thing; but all-classes legislation, I

which is a dreadfully bad

suppose, which is the right thing. Sure enough, just laws are an excellent attainment, the first condition of all prosperity of human creatures; but few reflect how extremely difficult such attainment is! Alas, could we once get laws which were just, that is to say, which were the clear transcript of the Divine Laws of the Universe itself; so that each man were incessantly admonished, under strict penalties, by all men, to walk as the Eternal Maker had prescribed; and he alone received honour whom the Maker had made honourable, and whom the Maker had made disgraceful, disgrace: alas, were not here the very Aristocracy we seek? A new veritable Hierarchy of Heaven,— approximately such in very truth,-bringing Earth nearer and nearer to the blessed Law of Heaven. Heroic men, the Sent of Heaven, once more bore rule: and on the throne of kings there sat splendent, not King Hudson, or King Popinjay, but the Bravest of existing Men; and on the gibbet there swung as a tragic pendulum, admonitory to Earth in the name of Heaven,—— not some insignificant, abject, necessitous outcast, who had violently, in his extreme misery and darkness, stolen a leg of mutton, but veritably the Supreme Scoundrel of the Commonwealth, who, in his insatiable greed and bottomless atrocity, had long, hoodwinking the poor world, gone himself, and led multitudes to go, in the ways of gilded human baseness; seeking temporary profit, scrip, first-class claret, social honour, and the like small ware, where only eternal loss was possible; and who now, stripped of all his gildings and cunningly devised speciosities, swung there an ignominious detected scoundrel; testifying aloud to all the earth: "Be not scoundrels, not even gilt scoundrels, any one of you; for God, and not the Devil, is verily king, and this is where it ends, if even this be the end of it!"

O Heaven, O Earth, what an attainment were here, could we but hope to see it! Reformed Parliament, People's League, Hume, Cobden agitation, tremendous cheers, new Battles of Naseby, French Revolution and Horrors of French Revolution-all things were cheap and light to the attainment of this. For this were in

fact the millenium; and indeed nothing less than this can be it.

But I say it is dreadfully difficult to attain ! And though class legislation is not it, yet, alas, neither is all-classes legislation in the least certain to be it. All classes, if they happen not to be wise, heroic classes,-how, by the commonest jumbling of them together, will you ever get a wisdom or heroism out of them?

Once more let me remind you, it is impossible for ever. Unwisdom, contradiction to the gods: how, from the mere vamping together of hostile voracities and opacities, never so dextrously or copiously combined, can or could you expect anything else? Can any man bring a clean thing out of an unclean? No man. Voracities and opacities, blended together in never so cunningly devised proportions, will not yield noblenesses and illuminations; they cannot do it. Parliamentary reform, extension of the suffrage? Good Heavens, how, by the mere enlargement of your circle of ingredients, by the mere flinging in of new opacities and voracities, will you have a better chance to distil a wisdom from that foul cauldron, which is mere bigger, not by hypothesis better? You will have a better chance to distil zero from it; evil elements from all sides, now more completely extinguishing one another, so that mutual destruction, like that of the Kilkenny cats, a Parliament which produces parliamentary eloquence, only, and no social guidance, either bad or good, will be the issue, as we now in these years sorrowfully see.

(From the Same.)

THE LAST FIGHT OF OLAF TRYGGVESON

By such persuasions and reiterations, King Svein of Denmark, King Olaf of Sweden, and Jarl Eric, now a great man there, grown rich by prosperous sea robbery and other good management, were brought to take the matter up, and combine strenuously for destruction of King Olaf Tryggveson on this grand Wendland expedition of his. Fleets and forces were with best diligence got ready; and, withal a certain Jarl Sigwald, of Jomsburg, chieftain of the Yomsvikings, a powerful, plausible, and cunning man, was appointed to find means of joining himself to Tryggveson's grand voyage, of getting into Tryggveson's confidence, and keeping Svein Double Beard, Eric, and the Swedish king aware of all his movements.

King Olaf Tryggveson, unacquainted with all this, sailed away in summer, with his splendid fleet; went through the Belts with prosperous winds, under bright skies, to the admiration of both shores. Such a fleet with its shining Serpents, long and short, and perfection of equipment and appearance, the Baltic

never saw before. Yarl Sigwald joined with new ships by the way; “Had," he too, "a visit to King Burislav to pay; how could he ever do it in better company? and studiously and

skilfully ingratiated himself with King Olaf. Old Burislav, when they arrived, proved altogether courteous, handsome, and amenable; agreed at once to Olaf's claims for his new queen, did the rites of hospitality with a generous plenitude to Olaf; who cheerily renewed acquaintance with that country, known to him in early days, the cradle of his fortunes in the viking line, and found old friends there still surviving, joyful to meet him again. Jarl Sigwald encouraged these delays, King Svein and Co. not being yet quite ready. "Get ready!" Sigwald directed them, and they diligently did. Olaf's men, their business now done, were impatient to be home; and grudged every day of loitering there; but, till Sigwald pleased, such his power of flattering and cajoling Tryggveson, they could not get away.

At length, Sigwald's secret messengers reporting all ready on the part of Svein and Co., Olaf took farewell of Burislav and Wendland, and all gladly sailed away. Svein, Eric, and the Swedish king, with their combined fleets, lay in wait behind some cape in a safe little bay of some island, then called Svolde, but not in our time to be found; the Baltic tumults in the fourteenth century having swallowed it, as some think, and leaving us uncertain whether it was in the neighbourhood of Rügen Island, or in the Sound of Elsinore. There lay Svein, Eric, and Co., waiting till Tryggveson and his fleet came up, Sigwald's spy messengers daily reporting what progress he and it had made. At length, one bright summer morning, the fleet made appearance, sailing in loose order, Sigwald, as one acquainted with the shoal places, steering ahead, and showing them the way.

Snorro rises into one of his pictorial fits, seized with enthusiasm at the thought of such a fleet, and reports to us largely in what order Tryggveson's winged Coursers of the Deep, in long series, for perhaps an hour or more, came on, and what the three potentates, from their knoll of vantage, said of each as it hove in sight. Svein thrice over guessed this, and the other noble vessel to be the Long Serpent; Eric always correcting him, "No, that is not the Long Serpent yet,” and aside always, "Nor shall you be lord of it, king, when it does come." The Long Serpent itself did make appearance. Eric, Svein, and the Swedish king hurried on board, and pushed out of their hiding

place into the open sea. Treacherous Sigwald, at the beginning of all this, had suddenly doubled that cape of theirs, struck into the bay out of sight, leaving the foremost Tryggveson ships astonished, and uncertain what to do, if it were not simply to strike sail, and wait till Olaf himself with the Long Serpent arrived.

Olaf's chief captains, seeing the enemy's huge fleet come out, and how the matter lay, strongly advised King Olaf to elude this stroke of treachery, and, with all sail, hold on his course, fight being now on so unequal terms. Snorro says, the King, high on the quarter-deck where he stood, replied, "Strike the sails; never shall man of mine think of flight. I never fled from battle. Let God dispose of my life; but flight I will never take." And so the battle arrangements immediately began, and the battle with all fury went loose; and lasted hour after hour, till almost sunset, if I well recollect. "Olaf stood on the Serpent's quarter-deck," says Snorro, "high over the others. He had a gilt shield and a helmet inlaid with gold; over his armour he had a short red coat, and was easily distinguished from other men." Snorro's account of the battle is altogether animated, graphic, and so minute that antiquaries gather from it, if so disposed, which we but little are, what the methods of Norse sea fighting were; their shooting of arrows, casting of javelins, pitching of big stones, ultimate boarding, and mutual clashing and smashing, which it would not avail us to speak of here. Olaf stood conspicuous all day, throwing javelins, of deadly aim, with both hands at once; encouraging, fighting, and commanding like a highest sea-king.

The Danish fleet, the Swedish fleet, were, both of them, quickly dealt with, and successively withdrew out of shot range. And then Yarl Eric came up, and fiercely grappled with the Long Serpent, or, rather with her surrounding comrades; and gradually, as they were beaten empty of men, with the Long Serpent herself. The fight grew ever fiercer, more furious. Eric was supplied with new men from the Swedes and Danes; Olaf had no such resource, except from the crews of his own beaten ships, and at length this also failed him; all his ships, except the Long Serpent, being beaten and emptied. Olaf fought on unyielding. Eric twice boarded him, was twice repulsed. Olaf kept his quarter-deck; unconquerable, though left now more and more hopeless, fatally short of help. A tall young man,