If Christiana, founded on the ruins of Opslo, is in the present day the official capital of Norway, and Trondhjem, the antique home of its Konungen and its Jarls, is always regarded as the real metropolis of the North, the city of Bergen, less aristocratic, has other reminiscences attached to it. It was the capital of commercial Norway. Bergen was the first city, according to M. Enault, with which England effected a treaty of commerce. This was in 1217. It is well known, he adds, that England did not remain satisfied with that diplomatic act; she found that what she had done was good, and she continued in the same path. The separation of Norway from Denmark brought Christiana into importance. Bergen remained stationary. What is more curious, being separated from the capital by mountains without roads, and lakes and fiords innumerable, it is actually looked upon by the Norwegians themselves as a city that is scarcely Norwegian. Its whole relations are with the sea, and in the present day its commerce is limited mainly to the export of wood, stock-fish, herrings, and cod-liver oil. Bergen was once decimated by the "black plague." It was conveyed thither by a phantom ship driven into the harbour by the winds, and which, for cargo, had nothing but corrupt bodies. The whole crew had perished.

One would fancy (says M. Enault) that the people of Bergen are complete ichthyophagists. You never, by any chance, meet in the streets men carrying bread, or women loaded with fruit, or young girls offering flowers to you: men, women, children, girls, half the town sells fish to the other half. Lobsters are also the source of a profitable fishery, and every week a squadron of little English schooners come to load with these ugly creatures, so much desiderated by the gourmets of London.

All the houses of Bergen are constructed of wood, but instead of being painted red or brown, as at Christiana and Trondhjem, they are painted white. Fires are, as may be imagined, very common. The objects of greatest interest in the city are the altar-piece at Saint Mary's, a splendid specimen of wood sculpture of the thirteenth century; and a figure, suspended in the air, over the sacred piscina or baptismal font. The Museum is admirable, as illustrative of local natural history. The cathedral has a choir only equalled, according to M. Enault, by that of York, which, according to the same authority, is the best in Europe; and British tourists, we are told, pay for the landscapes and interiors of M. Buntz their weight in gold.

Every site has its peculiarities. The inhabitants of Hardanger are the gayest people in Norway; they do nothing but dance and play upon the national fiddle, the four cords of which are carried through the interior. We are wrong: the Hardangers also manufacture their own rifles, and shoot grouse and heathcocks with a bullet. So fond are the Hardangers of pleasure, that every one goes to a marriage festival taking his or her own prog and own drink, and they keep up the festivities for eight days. It is obvious that by such a system any one who is so inclined, and who can afford it, may pass the year in a succession of matrimonial festivals.

From Bergen to the North Cape and Hammerfest our traveller effected his transit by steam-boat. He was one of the lucky ones. The sky was blue and limpid, there was not a breath of wind, and the sea was calm as a lake. He had heard, as every one has, much of the wonders of

navigating along the coast of Norway: the reality, he says, exceeded his anticipations. Those long, narrow channels, with their rocky walls, which separate island from island, and through which the steamer has to make its way as through a labyrinth, never fail to fill the traveller with wonder. At Aalsund are the ruins of the stronghold of the old pirate Hrolf-Gangr, Rollo the Walker, for the legend says be was too heavy to ride on a horse. This pirate became Duke of Normandy, wedded a daughter of France, and gave kings of his race to Great Britain. Molde is noticed as a site which contains within itself, in a remote corner of Norway, almost all that is characteristic of the country. An incomparable valley encloses within a space of a few leagues a little summary of all the beauties and all the terrors of nature. Its islands abound in hares and red deer, its rocks in sea-fowl, among which the eider-duck, whose spoliation is regulated by the laws, and is a source of considerable revenue to the dwellers on the coast. Of Christiansund, a town built upon three little islands which encircles its wondrously safe harbour, all that our traveller has to say is, that a cod eight to ten pounds in weight can be purchased there for twopence. It is, however, in reality, the history of the place. It is curious, M. Enault remarks of the coast of Norway, how few remnants of military architecture are met with there. Their castles, which, like the Arabs, they called Burg, or Borg, were mainly built along the coast of Scotland: they were always on the offensive, never on the defensive-at least when at home.

As we advance towards the north, the islands become more wild, and the rocks more naked and precipitous. A hill covered with verdure, or crowned by a grove of pine-trees, becomes a real relief, and the last that is met with is at Hildringen. The curiosities beyond that station are of a purely rocky character. Such is the great natural tunnel of Torghattan, produced by an arrow shot by a giant after a troll or magician, who was running away with his mistress. The shot missed "the necromancer of the north," and made a hole through the mountain. The petrified bust of the giant is still to be seen at a distance of some twelve miles in the interior; as to the damsel, she was turned into stone in the island of Leke.

Among the more remarkable rocks of the north are the Seven Sisters of the island of Alsten, and the Hestmand, or Herseman, who announces the proximity of the polar circle. Once within this region of ice and snow, even the sheltered bays, as those of Hundholm and Bringebeer, present nothing to the eye but holms and baers of granite topped by perpetual glaciers. At last, passing the well-known Maëlstrom, and the little less celebrated fishing stations of Lofoden Tronso, one of the most northerly towns in Europe is attained. It is, as may be easily imagined, but a small town of some 1500 inhabitants, built on an island and rising in successive terraces from the shelly beds level with the sea to the slopes of the hills above. Yet is Tronso the seat of perhaps the most extensive and the least peopled diocese in Christian lands. The bishop has only a cathedral of wood, as the governor of the province has a wooden palace, and the people have wooden houses. These wooden houses are flanked by the sea on one side, and by a glacier, whose green and blue peaks assume the most fantastic appearance when reflecting the midnight sun,

on the other. What a truly Arctic scene? Yet is there in this town, built in contact with a perpetual glacier, a college, a public library, a readingroom, a theatre, and a concert-room; nay, Tronso had its own newspaper, which was to have appeared twice a week, but as it grew irregular it was thought as well to leave it off altogether, and its editors probably derive more emolument from salting cod-fish.

There are also in the same northerly parallels-the land of the Quaeners, or Quaens-Bosekop, where the French scientific mission had its headquarters, and Talvig, mere villages; and, lastly, the better known Hammerfest, the most northerly town on the earth. This is a port of no small importance, although the town itself is insignificant enough, and the climate most repulsive; the mean temperature being below zero. The island on which the town is built is enveloped in perpetual fogs, through which the sun rarely forces its way, and when it does it gives out but little heat. A wealthy merchant of the place has endeavoured to create a garden, but as yet he has only succeeded in getting the soil. He does profess to have grown mustard and cress enough for two salads, and the circumstance has passed into the domain of local history. A rose-tree was also imported, but, although protected by eider-down, it never could be induced to flower. There are three or four houses (wooden, as usual) of two stories in Hammerfest. They are, M. Enault says, the Louvre, the Elysée, the Tuileries, and the Palais Royal of the place! There is also an inn, the rooms of which are square boxes, eight feet long by six in width, into which admission is obtained by a trap-door, and 160 francs a month are charged at this hostelry for board and lodging. One wonders who would be induced to stay a month in Hammerfest, unless he was engaged in measuring an arc of the meridian, or studying some of the multifarious phenomena of an Arctic residence. There is also a great laboratory for the distillation of cod-liver oil-the precincts of which present anything but an inviting odour. Hammerfest is the last point which the steamer attains in the present day. It is intended, it is said, at future seasons, to double the North Cape. Our tourists may then extend their researches even into more foggy regions. In the mean time, we think they ought to be quite satisfied to have reached the most northerly town in the world, and to have returned in safety.

THE SESSION-PUBLIC AFFAIRS.

BY CYRUS redding.

PARTY exhibitions and jarring political dogmas, in the view of the philosopher, are useful to keep up that ruffle upon the surface of the political waters which, in a land of freedom, implies the vitality of constitutional liberty. The opening of the first session of a new parliament, and another royal speech echoing from the sham-antique walls reared upon the ruins of the venerable St. Stephen's, have passed away, and much public business has been transacted since we last addressed ourselves to the parliamentary relations of the country. The dissolution, as we foresaw, strengthened the hands of the minister. Many speakers, who had delivered themselves like profound orators, with the exception that they never looked complacently on those who were not of their opinion, some who would fain be legislators through the qualification of words rather than things, and a few who used to speak to all but the question, were missing, and, it must be confessed, contributed by their absence to the acceleration of the business in the new House. The Opposition, more discreet than before in its offensiveness, solaced itself for its diminished consequence in Carlton Club dinners and consolatory toasts, or in the twofold operation of eating and listening-" venter habet aures." Its advocates of the press put on much of the neuter gender in politics. Their song resembled, in sameness of character and lack of inspiration, the verses of the after-dinner circle with which young ladies, under the score of Herr Hammerstein, the English-born German composer of the current year, greet the gentlemen fresh from their wine. Not that other opponents were not to be found ready with their chorus of discontents, but they exhibited a tame character, a milk-and-water mixture, scarcely worth tendering for sale-cheap shop articles. The Earl of Derby made no sign after the royal speech, reserving himself for the congenial intolerance of his display on the Oaths Bill; and Mr. Disraeli's hope expired mute as a songless swan. The previous sarcasm of the honourable gentleman, that Lord Palmerston had dissolved parliament " that he might waste a year," was forgotten at the moment memory most required it to be recalled, as a demonstration that the dissolution was neither a waste on the part of the minister, nor on behalf of the country.

The Persian war had terminated before parliament opened, and the ruffianly attack upon Sir James Brook by the emissaries of the meek and much-injured Yeh, was another unlucky stroke for the friends of the rotund mandarin of Canton. The party tactics were discomfited; what could it do better, in such a case, than forget the tale of the Secret Treaty, with which it played the old game of the 1st of April? What could it do but eat its pudding and hold its tongue? A new grievance must therefore be awaited before the part of Giant Widenostrils, the swallower of windmills, could be again enacted. Even the Neufchâtel dispute expired in peace.

But the purity of political attachments must be sustained. Politicians are the rarest of penitents, because they are the most wilful of sinners. The purity of a political attachment must be sustained, cost what it may Aug.-VOL. CX. NO. CCCCXL.

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in principle, with unsound pleas and invocations of obsolete usages, and barbarisms of the middle ages, pre-Raphaelite resources, somewhat like those of artists, who, finding nature too many for their abilities, exhume starched and dead superstitions to adorn their canvas. But there was more than opposition within the walls of parliament. There were still some few members who should have credited Lord J. Russell, when he said the real question was not about the mandarin Yeh, but about place. The excuse was, that like "tape-tied curtains never meant to draw," they meant nothing, and from the result spoke the truth. Mr. Denison being elected Speaker, and the majority for the minister being large, the hopelessness of an effectual opposition helped forward the public business.

Out of doors, a party once more called for a House broader in principle-a House that would concede to the people "their rights"-in short, a broad-bottomed parliament. The people had borne "their sufferings with great equanimity." Yet is it a fact that the people never had less reason to complain. For the last twenty years the nation has been rapidly advancing in prosperity. Wealth and population have run an equal race. Complaints are too often made to court a fleeting popularity. We see that trade has been increased to an unanticipated extent. Taxation, though heavy, is light in proportion to the means of meeting it, as compared with past days. On July 5th, with the loss of the malt duties, and the hop duty postponed, the revenue returns had reached the enormous sum of 72,060,8217. The income-tax, which weighed disproportionally on a struggling class of the community, had nearly ceased to oppress that class. Food was dear, it is true, all over Europe, from bad seasons. Our population, outstripping our agricultural supplies, and in England and Wales alone having doubled in half a century, this occasional dearness is not surprising. We have no remedy but emigration. A bridge to Canada, in the shape of an old line-of-battle ship, food and clothes being provided by the emigrant himself, would do wonders. Is it not a worthy object to people from our own stock the vast uninhabited regions of the earth, to spread abroad our copious language, and extend civilisation? We are too prone to disregard everything which does not benefit the living. We have burdened posterity with debt: let that evil be balanced by the legacy of newly-peopled regions; let us make our own markets, and increase that power which alone secures national independence. We have in Australia a proof of the wisdom of such a proceeding. The state of things during the present parliamentary session is such, that one can hardly imagine our domestic relations to be more in unison with rational expectation. We find, it is true, the cry of reform in parliament echoed faintly among those who, it is too well shown, are not proof against the coin of new parliamentary candidates in many of our boroughs. Thus, any man with a full purse gets into parliament, while it is contended that the people are not represented. When the people show a proper sense of their duties, and carry out the present reform bill to the letter, it will be well to do more-but let this be done first.

On the opening of the session, the Opposition was impersonated in General Thompson, who, like a bold soldier, declared his determination, "in behalf of the late majority in the House of Commons," not to let the China grievance drop. The general showed a most lion-like front, and