Page:Popular tales from the Norse (1912).djvu/30

 xxiv and Snorri, the worldly-wise priest, Mord Valgardson, the wily traitor, and Hallgerda, the overbearing hateful wife, are characters true for all time, whose works and ways are but eminent examples of our common humanity, and at once arouse our sympathy or our antipathy."

In 1842 he dedicated his first book to Thomas Carlyle in gratitude for the encouragement he received from him to definitely devote himself to literature.

This was a translation of the Prose, or Younger Edda, and was published at Stockholm. In the course of the following year appeared his Grammar of the Icelandic or Old Norse Tongue, from the Swedish of Erasmus Eask; and his Theophilus in Icelandic, Low German and other Tongues, from MSS. to which he had access in the Eoyal Library at Stockholm, followed in 1845.

He returned to England in the spring of this latter year and joined Delane at the Times Office as assistant editor, a post which he continued to fill with remarkable ability for the next quarter of a century. Of very different natures each of the two young brothersin-law, "John "Walter's three-year-olds," as they were sometimes called, contributed something which was wanting in the character of the other, and the result was a remarkable smoothness and evenness in the conduct of the paper. Though neither was at any time of his life what could be called a party man the instincts of Delane were decidedly Liberal; and Dasent himself wrote that during his whole tenure of office the columns of the Times "are composed out of the very ore of liberty and progress, and will for ever remain fehe best monument to his memory."