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268
SVENDBORG.
Chap. XLVIII.
This is a splendid place for bathing, and the
establishments—floating baths, with cradles for
non-swimming females—well-arranged and airy. Jelly-fish the
only drawback: beautiful to gaze upon, but most
disagreeable to the touch; added to which they sting—not
anything dire, but a prickly, disagreeable sensation.
Svendborg rather piques itself on its godfather King
Svend; though in old documents of the middle ages it is
more frequently written Sviin, or “ Pig Castle.”
Orthography, we all know, was very faulty until the present
century; and the same name, be it town or family,
you frequently find written in ten or fifteen different
manners. Still the inhabitants appear to have been
so touchy on the subject, and somebody, to clench the
matter, composed some doggrel, which he caused to be
hung up in the church, that I almost believe there to
have been some truth in the assertion.
A town planted on a hill is always picturesque. It
is something pleasant to overlook your neighbours’
chimneys ; and when the buildings are of ancient date, queer
and rambling, with storks’ nests and fruit-gardens,
it adds to the charm. As you pass down the street
you may read—if Danish be, like the French of Paris
to Chaucer’s Abbess, “ to you unknown”—in the Latin
tongue many a wise saw, many a good old proverb,
inscribed above the doorways, coeval with the buildings
themselves. Old saws, proverbs, and such like, are now
esteemed vulgar; but many, a good principle, many a
domestic virtue has soaked into the mind of man as
well as womankind, solely from the fact of its being
placed for ever before their eyes. Svendborg was a
loyal town to the house of Oldenborg, and Christian
III. evinced his gratitude for her fidelity in 1535:
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