Scandinavian mythology, speaking of the "Idols," Woden, Tuysco, Thor, and Friga; but though Milton was no doubt acquainted with his book, these deities make no figure among the gods of the Gentiles enumerated in Paradise Lost (Book i. 506-521). They had in fact, as I have already said, been long expelled by the Christian missionaries from popular belief, and for poetical purposes the grimness of Norse legend offered few attractions to minds fed by the Classical Renaissance on the rich beauties of Greek mythology. But for readers whose ennui would not yield to the too familiar stories of Ovid's Metamorphoses the discovery of the Scandinavian antiquities was in every sense a godsend.

2

In 1760 Gray was contemplating a History of English Poetry, and had made up his mind to write a chapter on Norse legend. The book from which he chiefly drew his information was Thomas Bartholinus' Antiquitatum Danicarum de causis Contemptae a Danis adhuc Gentilibus Mortis Libri tres. This contained two Norse odes, with Latin translations, which Gray adapted in 1761, intending them as specimens for his History; but when he dropped his historical design, he laid his renderings aside. In 1767, however, he determined to insert them in the Edition of his Poems, published by Dodsley, and he wrote to Beattie describing the odes as "two pieces of old Norwegian poetry, in which there was a wild spirit that struck me," while in a letter to Walpole he spoke slightingly of these and his Welsh adaptations as "two ounces of stuff." 4

Whereby and through the lacke of due distinction between the two nations our true originale and honorable Antiquitie lieth involved and obscured, and are remaining ignorant of our owne true ancestors, understand our descent otherwise than it is, deeming it enough for us to heare that Eneas and his Troians, the supposed ancestors of King Bruto and his Brittans, are largely discoursed of." Cited by Mr. Frank Edgar Farley in his Scandinavian Influences in the English Romantic Movement (p. 9), an admirable and exhaustive Monograph on the subject in vol. ix. of Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature (Boston), to which the reader is referred. 1 Vol. i. p. 38.

2 Scandinavian Influences in the English Romantic Movement, pp. 34-35. 3 Letter of 24th December 1767.

4 Letter of 25th February 1768.

Rendered into English, with his usual fine judgment, in verses of seven or eight syllables, Gray's Fatal Sisters and Descent of Odin at once inspired numerous imitators. Henry Mackenzie, author of The Man of Feeling, wrote a metrical introduction to The Fatal Sisters, from which the following stanza, apparently suggested by the imagery of The Bard, will serve as a specimen of the melodramatic Scandinavianism that soon became fashionable

Red his eye, that watched the book,
Sealed with many a hero's blood,
With bristling locks and haggard look,
The hoary prophet gazed the flood.

Another proof of the influence of the two odes may also
be cited, as it furnishes at the same time a typical example
of the fraudulent spirit frequently found among men of
letters in the period now under consideration.
In 1770
was published a little volume entitled Poems on Several
Occasions by Michael Bruce, a young Scotsman, who died
on the 5th of July 1767. They were edited by Bruce's
friend, John Logan, and among them was the well-known
Ode to the Cuckoo, which was for some time generally, and
no doubt rightly, regarded as the work of Bruce. The
editor, however, had prefixed to the volume the following
dishonest note:-

To make up a miscellany, some pieces, wrote by different authors, are inserted, all of them original, and none of them destitute of merit. The reader of taste will easily distinguish them from those of Mr. Bruce, without their being particularised by any mark.

No poems by Bruce having been before published, it was impossible to say certainly which of the contents of the volume were his, and it was therefore obviously open to Logan (who had got possession of all Bruce's MSS.) to claim any of the pieces he had edited which might be received with favour by the public. This he did in a volume of poems, published in 1781, which opens with the charming Ode to the Cuckoo. Among the poems published in 1770 were two Danish Odes, which,

being evidently inspired by The Fatal Sisters and The Descent of Odin, can hardly be supposed to have been written by Bruce, who died before Gray's odes appeared in print. Logan himself did not at once pretend to the authorship of the Danish Odes by inserting them in his volume of 1781: he may have thought it unsafe to claim as his own all the compositions of merit which had originally appeared after the name of his friend; but they were asserted to be his by one of his executors, the Rev. Thomas Robertson, and since no one else besides Bruce has been mentioned as their possible author, it cannot be said they are not Logan's. In any case they illustrate, both by their imitative style and by the enthusiasm with which they were received, the attitude of the age towards the Scandinavian Revival. One of them opens as follows:

The great, the glorious deed is done!
The foe is fled! the field is won!
Prepare the feast, the heroes call;
Let joy, let triumph fill the hall!

The raven claps his sable wings;
The bard his chosen timbrel brings ;
Six virgins round, a select choir,
Sing to the music of his lyre.

With mighty ale the goblet crown;
With mighty ale your sorrows drown;
To-day to mirth and joy we yield;
To-morrow, face the bloody field.

From danger's front, at battle's eve,
Sweet comes the banquet to the brave;
Joy shines with genial beam on all,
The joy that dwells in Odin's hall.

The fact that these odes were not translations, but imitations, of the Scandinavian manner points to the progress of the Revival since the appearance of The Fatal Sisters and The Descent of Odin; and Nathan Drake, writing on the subject thirty years after that date, defines the feeling then prevalent in the public mind:

What (he asks) can exceed the thrilling horror of Gray's celebrated Odes from the Norse, which first opened to English poetry a mine of the most wild yet terrific mythology? Since their appearance the fictions of the Edda have been seized upon with more freedom and avidity.1

Evidently the jaded taste of Drake's contemporaries required to be stimulated by an agreeable "thrill of horror"; and it is amusing to observe how long this sensation depended on the fancy that one of the enjoyments of the Scandinavian paradise was to drink out of the skulls of their enemies.

The funny mistake (observes Vigfusson), which led Bishop Percy and his copiers down to this very day to entertain the belief that the "Heroes hoped in Odin's hall to drink beer out of the skulls of their slain foes," has its origin in a misinterpretation of the phrase biug-viðum hausa by Ole Worm, who says, "Sperabant Heroes se in Aula Othini bibituros ex craniis eorum quos occiderant."

"2

Vigfusson says that the meaning of the original Norse is, "We shall soon be quaffing ale out of the crooked skullboughs (horns) in the splendid house of Odin,"3 a statement which would scarcely have sufficed to "thrill" the languid veins of civil society. In point of fact, the newly discovered Norse myths, as such, did little to stimulate original poetic invention, for, till the appearance of Sayer's Dramatic Sketches of Northern Mythology in 1790, almost all the efforts of the bards of the Revival were concentrated on the translation of five fine fragments of Norse poetry, first published by Percy in 1760, from materials largely derived out of the Chevalier Mallet's book, L'Introduction a l'histoire de Dannemarc. Most of the minor poets of the period, including Mathias, Miss Seward, and Matthew Gregory ("Monk") Lewis, tried their hands, with various degrees of success, at translating them, but their inspiration was of an entirely artificial kind; and indeed the quality of the treasure that the "mine of wild yet terrific 1 Literary Hours, ii. 73.

2 Cited in Scandinavian Influences in the English Romantic Movement, 3 Ibid. p. 62.

p. 62.

mythology" yielded to English Poetry at this epoch may be divined from the tamely didactic verses of Hayley on the subject; who says, addressing Mason :—

Thy modest Gray, solicitous to pierce

The dark and distant source of modern verse,
By strings untried, first taught his English Lyre
To reach the Gothic Harp's terrific fire:
The North's wild spectres own his potent hand,
And Hell's nine portals at his voice expand;
With new existence by his verse endued,
See Gothic Fable wakes her shadowy brood,
Which, in the Runic rhymes of many a Scald,

With pleasing dread our Northern sires appalled.1

3. The revival of Ossian and of Scandinavian Mythology served as nutriment for the tastes encouraged in poetry by the criticism of Joseph Warton; but a more really vital movement was effected, along the path first opened by his brother Thomas, through the revival of Medieval Forms of English verse. And here the subject branches off again into two divisions; one relating to the increased popularity of the Ballad metre, mainly due to the publication of Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry; the other to the Rowley Poems of Chatterton.

Beyond all the forms of early romantic poetry the Ballad had preserved an influence over the cultivated imagination of the English people. The old ballad of "Chevy Chase" had roused the heart of Philip Sidney, trained as he was in all the culture of the Italian Renaissance, "like a trumpet"; it had been praised also by the refined pen of Addison in The Spectator.2 Another ballad, William and Margaret, fraudulently claimed by David Mallet as his own composition, was enthusiastically noticed in The Plain Dealer by Aaron Hill.3 This appreciation of the ballad, in an age dominated by classical form, was the result of the vitality lingering in the art of minstrelsy. Though in a very I Essay on Epic Poetry. 2 Spectator, No. 70. 3 Plain Dealer for August 28, 1724. For an account of Mallet's fraud see Phelps' Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement. Appendix II.