sh traveller dug up
some of the ground last year, and it is said that an American gentleman
found a gold ring in the house of Njal. The story of him and of his
brave sons, and of his slaves, and of his kindred, and of Queens and
Kings of Norway, and of the coming of the white Christ, are all in the
"Njala." That and the other Sagas would bear being shortened for general
readers; once they were all that the people had by way of books, and they
liked them long. But, shortened or not, they are brave books for men,
for the world is a place of battle still, and life is war. These old
heroes knew it, and did not shirk it, but fought it out, and left
honourable names and a glory that widens year by year. For the story of
Njal and Gunnar and Skarphedin was told by Captain Speedy to the guards
of Theodore, King of Abyssinia. They liked it well; and with queer
altered names and changes of the tale, that Saga will be told in
Abyssinia, and thence carried all through Africa where white men have
never wandered. So wide, so long-enduring a renown could be given by a
nameless Sagaman.

CHARLES KINGSLEY

When I was very young, a distinguished _Review_ was still younger. I
remember reading one of the earliest numbers, being then myself a boy of
ten, and coming on a review of a novel. Never, as it seemed to me, or
seems to my memory, was a poor novel more heavily handled: and yet I felt
that the book must be a book to read on the very earliest opportunity. It
was "Westward Ho!" the most famous, and perhaps the best novel, of
Charles Kingsley. Often one has read it since, and it is an example of
those large, rich, well-fed romances, at which you can cut and come
again, as it were, laying it down, and taking it up on occasion, with the
certainty of being excited, amused--and preached at.

Lately I have re-read "Westward Ho!" and some of Kingsley's other books,
"Hypatia," "Hereward the Wake," and the poems, over again. The old
pleasure in them is not gone indeed, but it is modified. One must be a
boy to think Kingsley a humourist. At the age of twelve or ten you take
the comic passages which he conscientiously provides, without being vexed
or offended; you take them merely in the way of business. Better things
are coming: struggles with the Inquisition, storms at sea, duels, the
Armada, wanderings in the Lotus land of the tropical west; and for the
sake of all this a boy puts up good-naturedly with Kingsley's humour