circumlocution-office of construing and interpreting had the student to go before he reached the thing signified! The _falcon-bridge_ was the hand on which the falconer carried his bird. The _tongue_ of the bridge was the little finger; and the _gallows of the shield of Odin_, was the arm on which the warrior’s shield was wont to be suspended! They were mighty fellows, those Scalds, in the days of heathenism, but as Christianity dawned and rose, their power decreased. They became court poets, which, according to Ménage, was the same as court fool, and they sank into ordinary minstrels, who sang, as their historians say, with more truth than refinement, simply to “fill their bellies.” Like the Italian fools, the Scandinavian jesters seem to have been mere practical jokers. Of one, who was not clever enough to transmit his name to posterity, we are told that a King of Denmark once accepted his invitation to repair to an old castle, and there drink ale-soup with him; and that the fool, conducting his Majesty to the sea-+side, remarked, “There is the soup; when you have finished that you shall have the ale.” At a much later period the fool is to be found in another capacity; thus, at the triumphal entry of Admiral Bagge, there figured in the procession “the court fool Hercules,” whose duty it was to play on the fiddle. Nothing however is said of his proficiency. In Scandinavia, as elsewhere, the fool is sometimes seen in the light of excellent counsellor and acute statesman. This was the case with the jester of Frederick II. of Denmark, about 1580, when that monarch happened to be in much perplexity touching a bargain he had made, or half made, with some English merchants at Copenhagen. He had been induced to accept their offer to purchase the island of Huen, in the Sound, at the cost of as much English scarlet cloth as would reach all round the island, and a piece of gold for every fold of the cloth. The perplexity of Frederick arose from the fact that he had bethought himself, if the English possessed Huen they might fortify it, and with their fleets blockade the Sound itself. He was sorely puzzled, for he wished to break the bargain without seeming to break his word. He looked in utter helplessness at his fool; and the fool, smiling at the supposed difficulty, came to the King’s relief. “You have only to tell the English merchants,” said the descendant of Yorick, “that in standing to your contract, it is understood that as soon as they pay the price of the purchase, they must remove the article purchased; for it is not to be imagined that you sell such an unwieldy article, to let it stick at your door, or to let them stick on it in your very jaws.” The King was delighted; he wriggled out of his bargain, by the fool’s good aid, and the popular voice added the name of the Scarlet Isle to that of Huen, or Venusia.