Frequent allusions occur in the old Northern poetry which prove that proficiency in skating was one of the most highly esteemed accomplishments of the Northern heroes. One of them, named Kolson, boasts that he is master of nine accomplishments, skating being one; while the hero Harold bitterly complains that though he could fight, ride, swim, glide along the ice on skates, dart the lance, and row, “yet a Russian maid disdains me.” Eight arts are mine: to wield the steel, To curb the warlike horse, To swim the lake, or skate on heel To urge my rapid course. To hurl, well aimed, the martial spear, To brush with oar the main— All these are mine, though doomed to bear A Russian maid’s disdain. Specimens of old bone skates are occasionally dug up in fenny parts of the country. There are some in the British Museum, in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries, and probably in other collections. There seems to be good evidence that even in London the primitive bone skate was not entirely superseded by implements of steel until the latter part of last century. Mr. Roach Smith, F.S.A., describing one found about 1839, says that “it is formed of the bone of some animal, made smooth on one side, with a hole at one extremity for a cord to fasten it to the shoe. At the other end a hole is also drilled horizontally to the depth of three inches, which might have received a plug, with another cord to secure it more effectually.” There is hardly a greater difference between these old bone skates and the “acmés” and club skates of to-day, than there is between the skating of the middle ages and the artistic and graceful movements of good performers of to-day. Indeed, skating as a fine art is entirely a thing of modern growth. So little thought of was the exercise that up to the Restoration days it appears to have been an amusement confined chiefly to the lower classes, among whom it never reached any very high pitch of art. “It was looked upon,” says a writer in the _Saturday Review_ in 1865, “much with the same view that the boys on the Serpentine even now seem to adopt, as an accomplishment, the acmé of which was reached when the performer could succeed in running along quickly on his skates and finishing off with a long and triumphant slide on two feet in a straight line forward. A gentleman would probably then have no more thought of trying to execute different figures on the ice than he would at the present day of dancing in a drawing-room on the tips of his toes.”