society, its accepted laws and precepts, and vented his moral skepticism in bitter sarcasm and cutting paradoxes.  “But two things are white in this world,” he would say, “innocence and arsenic.”  The coupling of the two, however, nearly proved fatal to him.  He was involved in a mysterious affair of poisoning, in which the victim was a dunning creditor.  He was suspected of having given him arsenic by way of ridding himself of the debt which he could not pay.  No proof of the fact could be adduced, and the crime was never brought home to him; but public opinion was against him, and fearing or distrusting the justice of his country, he fled from it ere the case was tried.  He wandered over Europe and America, trying his hand at everything, and died, a literary wreck, in Germany, longing, and yet not daring, to return to his country.  Lately, the Society of Authors in Stockholm, judging that his crime was “not proven,” while his literary merits were great beyond all doubt, undertook the rehabilitation of his memory.  His remains were brought back from Lubeck, and buried in Stockholm with “literary” honors, among others a remarkable oration delivered at his grave by Verner von Heidenstam, in which he was styled a martyr in the great cause of the emancipation of thought.  Whatever may be thought of his moral character, Almquist was a great thinker and a wonderfully versatile writer.  The last of the romantics, he has been called a realist, a psychologist, and a symbolist, and he was certainly something of all these, half a century before the terms became battle-cries in literature, and came to designate literary schools.  One critic has made him out to have been a sort of forerunner of Ibsen, while another calls him the most modern of classics.  His genius placed him in advance of his age in most things.  He was the first in the list of those Scandinavian revolutionists who have laid out new landmarks in the field of thought, and introduced new methods in fiction and the drama.

Liberalism, which spread like wildfire over Europe after its outbreak in the July Revolution in France, reached Sweden soon after.  It was represented in literature by such men as Sturzen-Becker, Wetterbergh, and Strandberg, writing under the names of Orvar Odd, Uncle Adam, and Talis-Qualis; Blanche, who wrote stirring novels in the style of Eugene Sue; Hjerta, and the staff of the then newly founded Aftonbladet, who were revolutionizing the press.  The press was beginning to enlist the highest literary capacities of the country, gradually becoming what it now is, a purveyor not only of news but of thought, and a leader of opinion in literature and art, in science and philosophy.  In poetry, liberalism found its echo in the verses of Malmstroem, Nybom, Schlstedt.  In fiction its banner was carried by three women, two of whom—­well known in England and America—­Frederica Bremer, whose novels portrayed the home life of the middle class, Emelie Carlen, who idealized the fishermen and sea-faring folk of the West Coast, and Sophie von Knorring, who gave rather stilted descriptions of life in aristocratic circles.  All three were very productive, and their novels count by dozens.  Yet they failed to sustain the reputations their first works had won for them.