166 VISIT TO DENMARK [1799. 



forgery (one of them a nobleman). They continued 

 forging notes even whilst in prison. A gang of 

 thieves robbed a noble's house with the assistance of 

 his servants. Another gang formed a plan to rob and 

 murder indiscriminately, throwing the bodies into the 

 sea ; and this they actually perpetrated on several. The 

 causes of this profligacy among the lower classes may 

 be partly owing to the state of the currency and dear- 

 ness of provisions. The conduct of the late king gave 

 rise to the profligacy of the Court/''* 



Gustavus III. endeavoured by every means in his 

 power to render Stockholm a second Paris. He 

 increased the splendour of the Court, invented the 

 Court dresses, and encouraged the arts, besides erect- 

 ing a number of public buildings. He introduced 

 and encouraged effeminate habits, and pursued a 

 system of favouritism that led to his own destruction ; 

 for we were told that the real cause of Count Horn's 

 joining in the conspiracy to assassinate him nay, of 

 his originating the conspiracy itself was his loading 

 with honours and making governor of Stockholm a 

 young man who, from some cause, had made Horn 

 his implacable enemy.t The highest office under the 



* It must be held as corroborative of the accuracy of the account here 

 given of the amount of social immorality and of criminality in Sweden, 

 that a like picture is given of the country by an acute traveller there 

 nearly forty years later see ' A Tour in Sweden in 1 838, comprising 

 Observations on the Moral, Political, and Economical State of the 

 Swedish Nation,' by Samuel Laing, Esq. The popular Swedish novels 

 of Miss Bremer let their reader into the secret of social life by her re- 

 ference to those sins which prove sore temptations to the heroines whose 

 virtue overcomes them. 



t Gustavus III. was shot dead at a masked ball on 10th March 1792. 



