Wise Conservatism of Commissioners.

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have been entitled to great weight, and besides being valuable in themselves, would have probably conferred the substantial, though indirect benefit of saving us from the random and ill considered suggestions so frequent, both from Councils and individuals, at best wearing out the patience of the public, and rendering an important subject distasteful and unpopular, and which some chance success might elevate into real injuries to education. Again, we are informed that they received many communications from men engaged or interested in University teaching. It is to be regretted that these communications were not published. The opinions of such men would have been most instructive; and we should have been enabled to test the conclusion at which the Commissioners have arrived, by examining the grounds on which they have been based. Fiftyone pages in this blue-book, which might have contained much valuable evidence, have been utterly thrown away in recording the minutes of each meeting. What does the public care to know as to the order or form in which the Commissioners got through their work? The dates of the meetings, and the names of the Commissioners present, would have given all the information necessary.

On the other hand, it must be admitted, that their views on educational matters, so far as they go, are generally sound; and they are specially entitled to respect for their wise conservatism. They have required four sessions' attendance in arts as a condition of graduation; they have introduced little change in studies which experience has tested and found good; they have treated with fitting disregard the vulgar clamour often raised against classical learning; they have given no countenance to a notion-at one time wide-spread, and which in some quarters lingers yet that University Reform consists in establishing professorships in every branch of human knowledge: though the claims of important languages like Gaelic, and of profound sciences like Psycho-physiology seem to have been urgently pressed upon them. They might on some points have gone further; they have erred on the safe side. It is a thing to be thankful for, that our Colleges have not been exposed to rash and vexatious interference.

It has been sometimes said that the legislation of the Commissioners has been too exclusively in the interests of the Pro

1 In Glasgow the Commissioners have established three new Professorships -of English Literature, of Biblical Criticism, and of Conveyancing. Of these the first only imposes any burden on the public funds, the second being provided for out of the revenues of the Chapel-Royal, and the third being endowed by the Faculty of Procurators in Glasgow. In Edinburgh they have founded a Professorship of Sanskrit which receives £200 a year from the public funds, besides the interest of £4000 appropriated for that purpose by Dr. John Muir of Edinburgh.

fessors. We cannot see the slightest foundation for this charge. The Commissioners have so distributed the University funds and the moneys placed at their disposal by Government as to secure to our professors something like a respectable income. They have attached assistants to the chairs the work of which required such aid; and they have provided for the retirement of aged or infirm professors on the same footing as other public servants. But in all this, if we look at the thing fairly, they have consulted far less for the benefit of the professors than for the interests of the public. There seems to exist in some quarters a sort of hostility towards the professorial body which is very unreasonable and very unaccountable. Perhaps it may be a legacy from former times, when professors were undoubtedly appointed more from family affection than from regard to their fitness for the office. But these old abuses have been of late years less frequent, and are now, it may be hoped, at an end for ever. That even under the new system of patronage the best men will be uniformly appointed cannot be anticipated. When success is invariably in proportion to desert we shall have realized the condition of Plato's ideal state-" when kings shall be philosophers, and philosophers kings." But we may anticipate that bad appointments will henceforth be rare. The University Courts are as good dispensers of patronage as could have been easily devised, and will seldom, we fully believe, be actuated by any other feeling than an honest desire to do their duty. Therefore we may confidently expect that our professors will become, even more entirely than they now are, a body of men whom it were wrong to regard with any feelings other than those of respect and esteem. Setting aside their especial duties as teachers, they will do good to the country in many ways. Their influence as educated and liberal men will check the bad taste and bad manners of a narrow nationality; while, on the other hand, their eminence will preserve us from mere provincialism. They will do this far more effectually than either our Church or our Bar. In neither of these bodies is the present state of learning such as to bring much credit to the country; and, besides, the profession of letters is always, and rightly, more highly considered than any other, in respect that it is more liberal, better calculated to produce a high tone of mind and breadth and truth of view, less bountifully rewarded with the world's good things, less indeed of a profession or higher kind of trade, more of a pursuit followed for its own sake. With professors capable of rendering such services, and with a good system of examination in honours to stimulate and reward our students, we should see no reason to despair of the learning of the country, or to doubt that the future of our Universities may yet be worthy of their past.

ART. VIII.-1. Det Norske Folks Historie. P. A. MUNCH. Vols. i. ii. iii. Christiania, 1852-55. 2. Den Danske Erobring af England og Normandiet. J. J. A. WORSAAE. Copenhagen, Gyldendalske Boghhandling, 1863.

MEMORABLE words were those uttered by King Olaf Haroldson, a few days before his death, as he was crossing the border from Sweden to Norway, and climbing the ridge which looks down upon Veradale, and far out towards the west: "Yes, I am silent," he replied to Bishop Sigurd, who had asked why the flow of lively wit, with which he had cheered his chosen band on their weary way, had suddenly ceased, and why the King had sunk into a fit of brooding reserve. "Yes, I am silent, for strange things have now for a while come over me. As I gazed from the Fells towards the west, I thought how many happy days I have spent in this land. Then methought I saw not as far as Drontheim alone, but over all Norway; and lo! the longer the vision lasted, the farther I saw, till I saw over the whole earth, both land and sea. Then it seemed as though I knew clearly all the spots whither I had been before; but just as clearly saw I the spots which I had not before seen; yea, some even I had never heard spoken of, both where men dwell and where no man dwells, so far as the wide world stretches." Then the Bishop alighted from his horse, bowed before the King, and embraced his feet. "It is a saint we here follow," were his words to the wondering band. Not the least remarkable even then among that company was Harold Sigurdson, the King's half-brother, a youth scarce fifteen, but tall and manly beyond his years. Three days afterwards, the King met his rebellious chiefs at Sticklestad, a farm in Lower Veradale, and there, after a stubborn fight, he fell, with great part of his host, on the 31st of August 1030. But though conquered, he fell a conqueror. Much perished at Sticklestad besides the mortal body of Olaf Haroldson. That was the last outbreak in Norway of the old faith and the old order of things, against the new Christianity and the new system, of which Olaf was the great champion in the north. It was a protest against progress, civil culture, social order, and law rightly understood. Many centuries of old tradition, and a whole array of popular beliefs, stood side by side with the sturdy chiefs, who nominally fought for King Canute and the Danish rule in Norway, but really for their old prejudices, superstitions, and customs, for their isolated and individual independence, for their right of private war, for their own interests, in short, matched against the common good. Even before the fatal day, it is easy to see from all the accounts that the minds of the chiefs were ill at ease; even

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then the leaven of Olaf's enlightened reign was secretly working in the hearts of his people, who were led, many of them much against their consciences, to fight against their former lord. It seemed, no doubt, to many, a strange and bitter thing to fight for Danish rule against their lawful king, whose faults, whatever they might have been, were virtues compared to the insults and injuries suffered under a foreign yoke. Bitterer still for brother to slay brother, father son, and friend friend. Even the very fact that the host of the chiefs was overwhelming, while the King's band was small, though it helped his subjects to their hard-won victory, brought with it a reproachful feeling after the battle had ended in Olaf's overthrow, for it lessened the joy of victory to remember that numbers more than prowess had turned the fight, and Olaf's undaunted bravery only stood out in stronger and brighter relief against the dark masses of his foes. When to all this was added the "uncanny" feeling that, as well before God as towards men, they were on the wrong side, that Olaf was God's champion, that the firmness of his faith refused all heathen aid, that he refused to have any but baptized warriors in his ranks; in a word, that the wrath of Heaven was hot against the chiefs, and showed itself by strange signs and tokens, not the least of which was the total eclipse of the sun, which happened on that very afternoon, and hid the deed of blood with thick darkness just when Olaf fell: when we think of all this, we need not wonder that even those headstrong chiefs went back to their homesteads with the weight of murder on their hearts, or that they looked upon the sufferings which befell them shortly after from the Danish rule, as a just retribution for their sin. Then it was that the bishop's saying that King Olaf was a saint spread like wildfire among the people for whom he had done so much, and who had treated him so ill. Within the year, his body, which no one at first dared so much as to shelter beneath a roof, and which had been buried by stealth in a sandhill near Niðarós, as Drontheim was then called, was solemnly exhumed in the presence of, and in spite of the Danish rulers. It was found to be fresh and incorrupt, and laid in a costly shrine; and thus it was, that "Olaf the Fat," as his foes mockingly called him from the fulness of his figure, became Saint Olaf, the patron of Norway and the North; so fulfilling, in a wonderful way, a part at least of the vision which the King had seen on the Fells between Sweden and Norway.

But the repentance of the chiefs and people went further. By his death Olaf gave Norway that common feeling which makes a nation. So long as countries are split into small kingships, and each valley has its chief, it is difficult to get them to

Relations of Norway with Russia.

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combine for one common effort, and such countries are the natural prey of bold invaders. So it had been in Norway. Neither the mighty Harold Fairhair, great as had been his power-nor any of his sons and descendants, more or less feeble successors to his sway, had succeeded in rousing Norway to national spirit. Their time was spent in putting down rising after rising, in bowing down the haughty necks of chief after chief. They were kings often without a people, in hiding, in exile, and often their royal robe proved at last a bloody winding-sheet. At most they were kings of a part of Norway at a time, with other parts of the country in arms against them. But after Olaf's death all felt the want of a native ruler, all hated the Danish rule of Canute's son, Sweyn, who, a mere child, was a puppet in the arms of his mother Alfiva,1 the hated Saxon woman, with whom the great Canute

or Old Canute as the Northmen called him--had contracted an adulterous connexion, or at best a left-handed marriage across the sea in subject England, and all turned their eyes to Russia, where, under the fostering care of King Jaroslav, Magnus, Saint Olaf's only son by Alfhilda the Saxon slave-girl, a child of rare gifts of mind and body, was tenderly cherished and jealously guarded by his father's friends and kinsfolk.

The capital of the Russian rule in those days was Kieff, where the dynasty originally sprung from Rurik, the Scandinavian Viking, held its court. In the reign of Vladimir the Great, Jaroslav's father, those tribes had been converted to Christianity, and in his brother-in-law Jaroslav, for they both married daughters of King Olaf of Sweden, Saint Olaf had ever found a faithful friend and zealous follower of the true faith. The relations of the Russians to the North in general, and to Sweden in particular, were, for the most part, friendly, and through Russia, and down the Dnieper to the Black Sea, ran a constant stream of trade between the North and the farthest East. To Russia, then, the eyes of the repentant Norwegian chiefs were turned, and messages passed between the exiles in Russia and their countrymen at home, which ended in the year 1034, in an embassy or deputation, who went through Sweden to Russia, crossed the Baltic, and so up the Gulf of Finland to Aldeigjaborg a mart on Lake Ladoga, which was, in fact, the port of Holmgard, or Novgorod. At first, Jaroslav was very unwilling to trust the son to the mur

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1 Her true Saxon name was Ælfgifu. She was a daughter of Ælfhelm Ealdorman of Northampton. Florence of Worcester (Monum. Hist. Brit. i. 597) calls her "filia Alfhelmi ducis et nobilis matronæ Wulfrunæ." calls her also "Hamtunensis" and "Northamtunensis." Snorro (Heimskr., chap. 258) calls her father" Alfrun," a name blended out of his own and his wife's name. She had long been Canute's concubine before he was said to have married her, and even Saint Olaf was said by some to have been her lover, but the great king had lured her away from the then Norwegian Viking.