98 
LETTERS FROM HIGH LATITUDES. 
their own lava plains, that the student has to look hack 
upon the glorious drama of Iceland’s early history. 
As I gazed around on the silent, deserted plain, and 
paced to and fro along the untrodden grass that now 
clothed the Althing, I could scarcely believe it had 
ever been the battle-field where such keen and energetic 
wits encountered,—that the fire-scathed rocks I saw 
before me were the very same that had once inspired 
one of the most successful rhetorical appeals ever 
hazarded in a public assembly. 
As an account of the debate to which I allude has 
been carefully preserved, I may as well give you an 
abstract of it. A more characteristic leaf out of the 
Parliamentary Annals of Iceland you could scarcely 
have. 
In the summer of the year 1000, when Ethelred the 
Unready ruled in England, and fourteen years after 
Hugh Capet had succeeded the last Carlovingian on the 
throne of France,—the Icelandic legislature was con¬ 
vened for the consideration of a very important subject— 
no less important, indeed, than an inquiry into the 
merits of a new religion lately brought into the country 
by certain emissaries of Olaf Tryggveson,—the first 
