his comrades, he even wished to force a hereditary nobility on Norway, where all aristocracy had long been abolished. Under these circumstances, Tegnér felt himself, as it were, a member of the great European opposition. He pronounces the holy "Mohammedan" alliance to be a stillborn embryo, "whose burial on the gallows-hill he had every hopes of living to see;" he calls the politics of the period "infernal"; he writes to Franzén: "Concerning European politics of the present day, no honest man, not even a German, can express himself without a sense of shame and horror. In poetry it can be at best but the object of a Juvenal satire. To name the truly diabolical tendency of the obscurantism of the day, whenever there is a question of anything noble or great, whether it be in verse or in prose, may be designated a bitter irony." In the politics of the interior, he demands ministerial responsibility, equality before the law, the right of voting supplies, parliamentary representation,--in short, the usual programme of the opposition in liberal Europe. Such were the views to which he gave publicity in his great speech at the marriage of Prince Oscar, in 1823,--a noble wine served in polished crystal. In modern times, according to his conception of affairs, two powers were confronting each other,--personal merit, which had no other support than itself, and inherited rank; a plebeian and a patrician principle. This contrast had appeared in its sharpest form during the struggle between the despotism that arose from the Revolution, and that which came from the legitimists. Tegnér calls attention to the fact that the prince's young bride, who had but shortly before landed in Sweden, combined through her birth the two contending elements, and thus, as it were, united the past with the present. For her father (the son of the Empress Josephine, Eugène Beauharnais), "like so many other distinguished men, was a son of his own deeds, whose pedigree was an outgrowth of his sword," and on the maternal side she was descended from one of the oldest princely families of Europe (the mother of the bride was Amalie of Bavaria, of the house of Wittelsbach).