Indeed, if England wishes to know the facts of her Scandinavian period, it is to these people that she must look for information.
“Ten per cent. for my money!” That, alas! is too often an Englishman’s motto now-a-days; “and I can’t get that by troubling my head about King Olaf or Canute.”
While I write this I am reminded of an agreeable, good-looking young Briton whom I met here; he is a physician making four thousand a-year by administering doses of soft sawder. Thrown by circumstances early on the world, he has not had the opportunity of acquiring ideas or knowledge out of the treadmill of his profession. He is just fresh from Norway, through which he has shot like a rocket, being pressed for time.
“How beautiful the rivers are there,” he observed; “so rapid. By-the-bye, though, your river at Oxford must be something like them. The poet says, ‘Isis rolling rapidly!’”
Leaving the museum, I dined at the great restaurant’s of Copenhagen, Jomfru Henkel’s, in the Ostergade; it was too crowded for comfort. Dinner is à la carte.
Some convicts were mending the roadway in one of the streets; their jackets were half black, half yellow, trousers ditto, only that where the jacket was black, the inexpressibles were yellow on the same side, and vice versâ. Their legs were heavily chained. Many carriages were assembled round the church of the Holy Ghost; I found it was a wedding. All European nations, I believe, but the English, choose the afternoon for the ceremony.
Thorwaldsen’s colossal statues in white marble of our Saviour and his Apostles which adorn the Frue Kirke, are too well known to need description.
At the Christianborg, or Palace of King Christian, the lions that caught my attention first were the three literal ones in massive silver, which always figure at the enthronization of the Danish monarchs. Next to them I observed the metaphorical lions, viz., the sword of Gustavus Adolphus, the cup in which Peter the Great used to take his matutinal dram, the portrait of the unhappy Matilda, and of the wretched Christian VII.
Blush Oxford and Cambridge, when you know that on the walls of this palace, side by side with the freedom of the City of London and the Goldsmiths’ Company (but the London citizens are of course not very particular in these matters), hang your diplomas of D.C.L., engrossed on white satin, conferred upon this precious specimen of a husband and king.