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I Shall only produce one piece more, but one much more considerable than any of the preceding, and which, by the many little circumstantial strokes it abounds with, will give us a still deeper insight into the manners and genius of the times we wish to know. It is extracted from a Collection of ancient historical Monuments of the North, published by Mr. E. J. Biorner, a learned Swede, under the title of “Nordiska Kâmpedater, &c.” i. e. “The Exploits of the northern Kings and Heroes, &c. Stockholm, 1737.” This Author published the following piece from a manuscript preserved in the Archives of the College of Antiquities in Sweden, and accompanied it with a Swedish and Latin Version. I have been as much assisted by the former, as I have been careful to keep at a distance from the latter: for Mr. Biorner, who had faithfully followed his original in the one, hath employed so many rhetorical flourishes in the other, or, to say the truth, a style throughout so puffy and inflated, that instead of an ancient northern Scald, one would think one was hearing a boy newly come from studying his rhetoric. This loose and faithless manner of translating, cannot, in my opinion, be too much
