ciety the Rumford medal: the highest scientific names recommended him for the position to which he aspired. But the chair of mathematics, like the other chairs in the university, had long been looked upon as a profitable appendage to the dignity and emoluments of a city minister. A Mr. Macknight, son of the commentator on the New Testament, was fixed upon by them as the person to fill the chair; a respectable man, but nothing more. The friends of Leslie and of science were resolved to carry the day, and they did carry it; but not without a desperate struggle. Untrue to the liberal instinct which had so long guided them, the Moderates charged Leslie with infidelity because, in a note to his Inquiry into the Nature of Heat,' he had spoken with approbation of Hume's Theory of Causation.' The popular Evangelical party, on the other hand, led for the time by the wise moderation of Sir Henry Moncrieff, espoused the cause of Leslie's appointment. The parties changed sides entirely, as Mr. Cunningham remarks. Hitherto the Moderates had been 'the earnest advocates of intellectual liberty. They had de'fended Simson, Wishart, Leechman; they had saved Kames and Hume from excommunication.' But they had outlived their old spirit, or at least they had changed their old tactics; and in either case the issue was fatal to them. They were beaten on their own chosen arena, the floor of the General Assembly; they were discredited in the intellectual world; they retired with broken ranks and damaged character,' and never recovered this disastrous defeat.

We

While the Moderate party was thus breaking up in mistake and weakness, two men of remarkable powers,-one of splendid genius, had but lately been added to the roll of the Scottish clergy, Andrew Thomson and Thomas Chalmers. In these two men the Evangelical party in the Church received an accession of strength which soon told throughout its borders and far beyond them; and the influence of which upon the subsequent popular movement it would be difficult to over-estimate. cannot now attempt to indicate the consequences which sprang from their labours, nor even to sketch, however faintly, their characters. They laboured, and others entered into their labours. They prepared the question which, after ten years of unceasing and terrible struggle, ended in the disruption of 1843; yet they were not the actual leaders in that conflict. Dr. Thomson had gone to his rest even before it fairly began, dying in a moment one day as he reached his own door, the victim of an exhausting energy of spirit. The figure of Chalmers was every where seen in the conflict, and his great name sanctioned it to many minds; but how little he either initiated or controlled its principles and

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modes of action, is well known to all who know anything of its secret history. A younger race which had grown up around him,- hardier logicians, combatants subtler in tactics, and more fiery and dogmatic in spirit, were the real springs of the movement, the authors of its principles, the leaders of its forces.

The result was a disaster which most good men now regret; but whether, from the nature of Presbytery and the character of the clergy it has an inherent tendency to foster, it was an avoidable disaster, must remain in the meantime a moot ques tion. All who understand its genuine history, and the principles which really lay at the bottom of the movement, and which have once more, within the narrower and chosen sphere to which they had withdrawn, begun to show themselves in aggressive manifestations, must admit that the Scotch ecclesiastical revolution of 1843 was not one that could have been avoided by any mere adroitness of state skill. The crisis may have been worse for the blindness and insensibility to danger that were manifested in certain quarters; but it could scarcely have been averted, even by a higher knowledge and more comprehensive offers of adjustment.

Whether Scottish Presbytery be capable at once of a vital spiritual and a free intellectual development,-of an activity which, while nobly fervent in every good work, far beyond the conception of the ancient Moderatism, shall unlearn the narrowness of party watchwords which represent the confusions of a past fanaticism far more than the strength of any Christian principle, is a point which the future must settle. If the hope of this should be thought but slight, there are many signs around us to show that the difficulty is one not merely inherent in Scottish Presbytery. The darkened scenes of recent religious controversy, and the panic of a startled theology, but too surely prove that the same difficulty, if in a less degree, attaches to the Church of England. It would be encouraging at least to cherish the confidence that the Churches have learned more than in earlier times to mingle tolerance with their contentions, and to strive for the Truth without misdoubting her strength by the employment of carnal weapons in her defence. Surely Milton's high-hearted faith may expect some echo in this nineteenth century;- Let her and Falsehood grapple. Who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best suppressing.'

ART. VI.-The Story of Burnt Njal, or Life in Iceland at the end of the Tenth Century. From the Icelandic of the Njal's Saga. By GEORGE WEBBE DASENT, D.C.L. 2 vols. 8vo. Edinburgh: 1861.

THE

HE travellers who year by year lay before us their descriptions of the steam-clouded valleys, lava-covered plains, and mud volcanoes of Iceland, seem scarcely aware that the land of their pilgrimage ever had a history. This is the less excusable because the names of places in Iceland are peculiarly picturesque and descriptive; the language has never changed since the island was first colonised-almost exactly a thousand years ago—and the name of every mountain, fjord, and farmhouse tells of some temple, some hero, or some exploit. Yet while a transport of classic enthusiasm is called up by the conjectural verification of the site of some petty skirmish in the Peloponesian War, the story of an island so nearly connected with England itself, is not only neglected by Englishmen, but is by them at least scarcely known to exist. There is no task more difficult than to introduce such a subject to the English public. It is like writing of something which took place in another planet. As young men are now educated, there is no part of their knowledge which may serve as a point of departure to bridge over the gulf which separates them from Scandinavian history, literature, and polity. Everything must be told from the beginning, and nothing must be taken for granted, except a general abhorrence of the Danes as described by our monkish historians, and some vague notions of the mythology of the Scandinavian Pantheon, in which the men of the North first personified as giants and fiends the rough and terrible agencies of Nature which surrounded and oppressed them, and then superseded their own creation by deities made in the image of man, and faithfully representing his own passions, feelings, and aspirations.

And yet, probably, there does not remain for the critical student of history a more interesting investigation, than an inquiry into the causes which created and maintained for a hundred years an aristocratic republic in Iceland, rich in valour and enterprise, and formed on principles unique in the history of the world. Geographers might not unprofitably sift the evidence which proves, with irresistible cogency, the discovery by Icelanders of Greenland, Labrador, and New England, before the conclusion of the tenth century. Philologers might well inquire

into the language of the conquerors of the Roman Empire, which has been preserved like a fly in amber almost unchanged up to the present day in the wild valleys of Iceland. The man of taste and letters might study with pleasure and with profit, a literature which contains the first outpourings of a vigorous and heroic spirit, which has all the freshness of the early dawn, and is unsurpassed, even by the Homeric poems, as a vivid and faithful picture of life and manners. The student of sacred history may view in these records a state of society, of feeling, and of literature, not unlike, in many respects, that which is found in the historic and nomic books of the Old Testament. In both he will find a clear and graphic narrative, interspersed with terse and energetic dialogue, and a contemplative spirit, finding expression in short and weighty aphorisms, or in homely but expressive proverbs. The student of English history may well wish to know what manner of men those Danes really were, before whom the fierce and victorious Saxons trembled, and to learn this from their own lips; and the philosophical lawyer will not misplace his time in studying the jurisprudence of Iceland, in which he will find the germs and the origin of

our own.

Mr. Dasent has undertaken the Herculean task of introducing this history and this literature to the English reader. He is well qualified for the undertaking by a complete and accurate knowledge of the subject, and by the possession of a pure vein of English undefiled, which enables him to transfuse into our own language much of the racy vigour and quaint homeliness of the original. His plan also seems to us eminently judicious. He has presented one of the masterpieces of Icelandic literature, the Njala,' or Tale of Njal, as a first specimen, to be shortly followed, as we learn from certain references in the notes, by a translation of the Tale of the Orkneys, a subject closely interwoven with the history of Scotland. England, which now stretches forth her arms to the extremities of the earth, formed, nine hundred years ago, one of a small number of States, Ireland, Normandy, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland, which were a little world to themselves, and entertained but scanty relations with the rest of mankind. To this world Mr. Dasent seeks to introduce us. But before we follow his guidance, we must, in order to make ourselves intelligible to the very numerous class of readers whose attention is for the first time directed to this remote subject, particularise a few dates and facts, which are requisite for the understanding of Icelandic history, and give some idea of the literature, a specimen of which appears now for the first time in an English garb.

The colonisation of Iceland began in A.D. 874, and continued for sixty years. The colonists were the small kings and independent chieftains of Norway, too weak to resist the power of Harold Harfagr, and too proud to acknowledge a superior. In defiance of the king they went forth in such numbers, that by 930 the land was settled as fully, probably, as it is now. They took to themselves large districts, which they distributed among their relatives, their freedmen, and their thralls. The colony was founded in a spirit most hostile to the mother country, which the settlers left with feelings somewhat similar to those which sent the Phocæans forth to found Marseilles. Had Iceland been within the reach of King Harold, the feudal system would no doubt have sprung up there as the readiest means of mutual protection against him; but the king's arm was not long enough to reach the fugitives, and the consequence was that the smaller settlers were freed from feudal burdens, and the larger landholders, having no common fear to bind them together, lived in absolute independence of each other. The petty kings of Norway became petty kings in Iceland. But that which fear of a stronger power could not effect was accomplished at last by the salutary dread which these petty sovereigns felt of each other. Weary of discord they asked for law, and for a common place of meeting where they might deliberate on their general interests, and arrange their differences by arbitration and agreement. Law and a common place of meeting, by the side of the Thingvalla Lake in the south-west of the island, were established in 930, and Ulflirt was the first lawgiver and first interpreter of the law. In 962 the island was divided into quarters each with its separate court of justice, and among those courts was divided the jurisdiction previously exercised by one central court. About the year 1000 Christianity was introduced into Iceland, not by violence, but by the act of the lawgiver for the time being, Thorgeir, to whose arbitration, although himself a heathen, Christians and pagans agreed to leave the question of the adoption of the new faith; and by whose arbitration, when it was given in favour of Christianity, the pagans, though with some murmurs, abided. This first Reformation, like the second which succeeded it five hundred years afterwards, was not only a great religious but a great political revolution. It drew after it immediately the abolition of the Holmgang or judicial combat, which was solemnly abolished in Iceland just a hundred years before it was as solemnly promulgated by Godfrey of Bouillon and the crusaders in the assize of Jerusalem. This introduction of Christianity also stripped each great chief of a portion of his power. On each large domain a temple was