had stolen through secret by-paths into the mind of the crown prince, and had completely overpowered it. The frivolity of the father, to be sure, had served as a warning, and had given the first backward impulse; the murder of the father gave the second. Soon Gustavus IV. had gone farther in his ever-present consciousness of majesty than any Bourbon. He forbade the daily papers to use the pronoun "we" in such applications as, "We are waiting with impatience for news," "We have had a severe winter," because this seemed to him equivalent to an encroachment on that royal prerogative which is known as _Pluralis majestatis._ All the publications that appeared in the land were subjected by his orders to the strictest supervision; and personally he cherished so great a horror of books that he burst into loud utterances of delight whenever he heard that a printing-house had failed. He himself never read anything except his Bible and the regulation work on military tactics. And this was the king, who, in the foolish war against Napoleon, never rested until he had lost Stralsund and Rügen, and whose insane war against Russia led to the definite conquest of all Finland by a Russian army. Runeberg in his poem "The King" in "Fänrik (Ensign) Staal," has erected for Gustavus IV. the monument he deserved. In the year 1809 a couple of courageous officers compelled him to abdicate the throne. The duke of Södermanland followed him as Charles XIII., and it was shortly afterward, when the adopted son of the latter died, that the French party in Sweden, through a mistaken idea of pleasing Napoleon and the illusory hope of thus winning back Finland, had Bernadotte chosen crown prince. His form emerged in a brilliant light from the gloomy background of the shadows of his predecessors. During a period of thirty-three years, the celebrated commander-in-chief guided the politics of Sweden; and this king whose reign is contemporaneous with Tegnér's most vigorous years, shares with Tegnér the honor of having given the name to the generation he ruled over. The period from 1810 to 1840 belongs to Charles John, and to Tegnér. Such are the pictures of the rulers who at that time, one after another, imprinted their physiognomies on Sweden, and whose profiles are stamped on the coins that passed through the fingers of Tegnér when he was a child, a clerk, a student, and a _magister._ VI. Tegnér is instructor (docent) at the University of Lund; he is twenty-two years old, and is passing his summer vacation on the Rämen estate in the Myhrmann family, with whose youngest daughter, Anna, he is betrothed.