To the artist, the amateur, the traveller, and man of taste in general, the following gleanings respecting the diet of various nations, are, in the spirit of English hospitality, cordially inscribed.  The breakfast of the Icelanders consists of skyr, a kind of sour, coagulated milk, sometimes mixed with fresh milk or cream, and flavoured with the juice of certain berries; their usual dinner is dried fish, skyr, and rancid butter; and skyr, cheese, or porridge, made of Iceland moss, forms their supper; bread is rarely tasted by many of the Icelanders, but appears as a dainty at their rural feasts with mutton, and milk-porridge.  They commonly drink a kind of whey mixed with water.  As the cattle of this people are frequently, during winter, reduced to the miserable necessity of subsisting on dried fish, we can scarcely conceive their fresh meat to be so great a luxury as it is there esteemed.  The poor of Sweden live on hard bread, salted or dried fish, water-gruel, and beer.  The Norwegian nobility and merchants fare sumptuously, but the lower classes chiefly subsist on the following articles:—­oatmeal-bread, made in thin cakes (strongly resembling the havver-bread of Scotland) and baked only twice a-year.  The oatmeal for this bread is, in times of scarcity, which in Norway frequently occur, mixed with the bark of elm or fir tree, ground, after boiling and drying, into a sort of flour; sometimes in the vicinity of fisheries, the roes of cod kneaded with the meal of oats or barley, are made into a kind of hasty-pudding, and soup, which is enriched with a pickled herring or mackerel.  The flesh of the shark, and thin slices of meat salted and dried in the wind, are much esteemed.  Fresh fish are plentiful on the coasts, but for lack of conveyances, unknown in the interior; the deficiency however, is there amply supplied by an abundance of game.  The flesh of cattle pickled, smoked, or dry-salted, is laid by for winter store; and after making cheese, the sour whey is converted into a liquor called syre, which, mixed with water, constitutes the ordinary beverage of the Norwegians; but for festive occasions they brew strong beer, and with it intoxicate themselves, as also with brandy, when procurable.  The maritime Laplanders feed on fish of every description, even to that of sea-dog, fish-livers, and train-oil, and of these obtaining but a scanty provision; they are even aspiring to the rank of the interior inhabitants, whose nutriment is of a more delicate description, being the flesh of all kinds of wild animals, herbaceous and carnivorous, and birds of prey; but bear’s flesh is their greatest dainty.  Rein-deer flesh is commonly boiled in a large iron kettle, and when done, torn to pieces by the fingers of the major domo, and by him portioned out to his family and friends; the broth remaining in the kettle is boiled into soup with rye or oat-meal, and sometimes seasoned with salt.  Rein-deer blood is also a viand with these people,