section we noted the achievements of English
scholarship and genius working under great disadvantages. Gray and Scott
may have had a smattering of Icelandic, but Latin translations were
necessary to reveal the meaning of what few Old Norse texts were
available to them. This paucity of material, more than the ignorance of
the language, was responsible for the slow progress in popularizing the
remarkable literature of the North. Scaldic and Eddie poems comprised
all that was known to English readers of that literature, and in them
the superhuman rather than the human elements were predominant.

We have come now to a time when the field of our view broadens to
include not only more and different material, but more and different
men. The sagas were annexed to the old songs, and the body of literature
to attract attention was thus increased a thousand fold. The
antiquarians were supplanted by scholars who, although passionately
devoted to the study of the past, were still vitally interested in the
affairs of the time in which they lived. The second and greatest stage
of the development of Old Norse influence in England has a mark of
distinction that belongs to few literary epochs. The men who made it
lived lives that were as heroic in devotion to duty and principle as
many of those written down in the sagas themselves. I have sometimes
wondered whether it is merely accidental that English saga scholars were
so often men of high soul and strong action. Certain it is that Richard
Cleasby, and Samuel Laing, and George Webbe Dasent, and Robert Lowe are
types of men that the Icelanders would have celebrated, as having "left
a tale to tell" in their full and active lives. And no less certain is
it that Thomas Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold, and William Morris, and
Charles Kingsley, and Gerald Massey labored for a better manhood that
should rise to the stature and reflect the virtues of the heroes of the
Northland.

RICHARD CLEASBY (1797-1847).

In the forties of the nineteenth century several minds began to work,
independently of one another, in this wider field of Icelandic
literature. Richard Cleasby (1797-1847), an English merchant's son with
scholarly instincts, began the study of the sagas, but made slight
progress because of what he called an "unaccountable and most scandalous
blank," the want of a dictionary. This was in 1840, and for the next
seven years he labored to fill up that blank. The record[16] of those
years is a