In 1590 papal envoys had purchased the relics of another Swedish saint named David, who hung his gloves on sunbeams, and the church at Munketorp was built with the price they paid; but the priest who effected the sale boasted at a synod that he had only given up the first skeleton that he found in the vaults of the church. St. Brita has taken a strong hold on popular imagination in Sweden and figures largely in the folklore of the land. Her peculiar sanctity it is said enabled her to see the devil, until one day she failed to control her laughter when in church she saw him bump his head against a pillar. He was trying to stretch a goat's skin with his teeth, for as it was the vellum was far too small to hold the names of those that he noticed nodding as the sermon wore. The local colour of this tale seems distinctly later than the fourteenth century, when St. Brita was alive. In the Lady Chapel of the cathedral is a fine monument to Gustaf Vasa with effigies in English alabaster of the king and two wives. The walls are painted with some of the events of his adventurous life.[111] Restored to his birth-land in 1908 and deposited in this cathedral after original burial in England during 1772, are the bones of one of the strangest characters that Sweden ever produced, Emanuel Swedenborg. Son of a distinguished bishop, he early made a name as a scientist and his achievements were of no mean kind. He anticipated modern knowledge as to the planets of the solar system flying off from the mass of the sun and developing their own orbits and rotations. In England he knew Newton, Halley and Flamsteed, and on the Continent also he met the chief men of science of his day. Great practical assistance in the engineering line he was able to afford to Charles XII., including help in the construction of docks at Karlskrona (p. 164), and the transport of ships overland in the war against Norway in 1718. During the latter part of his life Swedenborg had visions and founded in London the _Society of the New Church signified by the New Jerusalem_, his ideas being much influenced by Gnosticism. How far he was qualified as a religious teacher is of course a matter of opinion. Emerson says that he is "disagreeably wise, and with all his accumulated gifts paralyses and repels." Few spots of Europe surpass in interest these simple and unornamented monuments of all the ages of the northern world: earth mounds told of in saga story, cathedral carrying the loveliest style of central Europe to the far North, castle where kings dwelt of old, university that has influenced the thought of all mankind. Though the capital is moved to the outlet of the lake, where there rises a yet fairer town, this plain is the true centre of Swedish story from earliest to latest days. As Tegnér's _Drapa_, Englished by Longfellow expresses it: