Page:Sturla the Historian.djvu/20

 20 Sverre had taken much trouble over the rights of the question. Against the new law which the Bishops had tried to establish in 1164, which would have made the king vassal of the Church, Sverre had drawn up a full statement, one of the clearest and most interesting of political arguments, which asserts the Divine Right of Kings apart from any ecclesiastical interference, and proves it against the Churchmen by citations from the Canon Law. The old Birkibeins did not trouble themselves much about the science of politics, but their watchword, the Law of St. Olaf, meant in practice what Sverre had meant both in practice and in theory. The good fortune of the young Hacon was that he grew up among the veterans into a full comprehension of the ideas of Sverre. So that in this case, at any rate, the Carlylean ideal is not refuted by the death of the champion, or by the collapse of all his work under some foolish Ishbosheth of a successor. It looked like that, it is true, for some years after the death of Sverre—it looked as if the deluge had come back. But this was prevented by the fixed idea of the old partisans, and by the education of Hacon; all which is clearly brought out in Sturla's biography.

There are two Norwegian essays on Monarchy which may very fairly be contrasted with Sturla's Icelandic portrait of a king of Norway. They are both didactic: one is Sverre's treatise, already mentioned; the other is the Speculum Regale, or King's Mirror (Konungs Skuggsjá'), written in the ordinary conventional form of a dialogue between a father and son, but very original and lively in its matter. The father is a king's man, as he calls himself, and among many other things he tells his views about the nature of a king and the manners of a Court: how one should demean himself in the