Returning to the inn, I amused myself till the next train arrived by looking at the Copenhagen paper, from which I learn that twenty pairs were copulerede—married—last week, and that there has been a great meeting of Mormons in the capital. Such has been the effect of the mission of the elders in Jutland, that that portion of Denmark is becoming quite depopulated from emigration to the city of the Salt Lake. There is also a list of gold, silver, and bronze articles lately discovered in the country, and sent to the museum of Copenhagen, with the amount of payments received by each. In the precious metals these are according to weight. One lucky finder gets 72 rix dollars.
By the next train I advance to Roeskilde, which takes its name from the clear perennial spring of St. Roe, which ejects many gallons a minute. Baths and public rooms are established in connexion with it. But it was the Cathedral that drew me to Roeskilde. A brick building, in the plain Gothic of Denmark, it has not much interest in an architectural point of view; but there are monuments here which I felt bound to see. Old Saxo Grammaticus, the chronicler of early Denmark, the interior of whose study is so graphically described by Ingermann in the beginning of Valdemar Seier—he rests under that humble stone. Here, too, is buried in one of the pillars of the choir, Svend Tveskjaeg, the father of Canute the Great, who died at the assize at Gainsborough, in 1014.
Queen Margaret (the Northern Semiramis), who wore the triple crown of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, sleeps behind the altar, under a full-length monument in white marble more than four centuries old. It were well if the Scandinavian idea, now absorbing the minds of thinking men in the North, were to find a more happy realization than in her case—the union, instead of allaying the hostility with which each nation regarded the other, only serving to perpetuate embroilments. Some good kings and great repose here; also some wicked and mean. Among the former, it will suffice to mention Frederick IV., whom the Danes look upon as their greatest monarch. A bronze statue of him by Thorwaldsen is to be found in one of the chapels. In the latter category we unhesitatingly place Christian VII., to whom, in an evil hour, was married our Caroline Matilda, sister of George III., who died at the early age of twenty-three.
“And what do the Danes think now of Matilda?” inquired I of a person of intelligence.
“Oh, they say ‘Stakkels Matilda!’” (unfortunate Matilda), was the touching but decisive reply. So that by the common voice of the people her memory is relieved from the stain cast upon it by those who were bound to protect her, the vile Queen-mother and the good-for-nothing King.
CHAPTER II.
Copenhagen—Children of Amak—Brisk bargaining—Specimens of horn fish—Unlucky dogs—Thorwaldsen’s museum—The Royal Assistenz House—Going, gone—The Ethnographic Museum—An inexorable professor—Lionizes a big-wig—The stone period in Denmark—England’s want of an ethnographical collection—A light struck from the flint in the stag’s head—The gold period—A Scandinavian idol’s cestus—How dead chieftains cheated fashion—Antiquities in gold—Wooden almanacks—Bridal crowns—Scandinavian antiquities peculiarly interesting to Englishmen—Four thousand a year in return for soft sawder—Street scenes in Copenhagen—Thorwaldsen’s colossal statues—Blushes for Oxford and Cambridge—A Danish comedy—Where the warriors rest.