k,
from Germany, I hear nothing but what gives me pleasure; it is from
Norway that everything bad comes upon me." It was indicated to would-be
Norwegian visitors that they were not welcome at Dresden. Norwegian
friends, he said, were "a costly luxury" which he was obliged to deny
himself.

The First Part of _Julian_ was finished on Christmas Day, but it took
over a year more before the entire work, as we now possess it, was
completed. "A Herculean labor," the author called it, when he finally
laid down a weary pen in February, 1873. The year 1872 had been very
quietly spent in unremitting literary labor, tempered by genial visits
from some illustrious Danes of the older generation, as particularly
Hans Christian Andersen and Meyer Aron Goldschmidt, and by more formal
intercourse with a few Germans such as Konrad Maurer and Paul Heyse; all
this time, let us remember, no Norwegians--"by request." The summer was
spent in long rambles over the mountains of Austria, ending up with a
month of deep repose in Berchtesgaden. The next year was like unto this,
except that its roaming, restless summer closed with several months in
Vienna; and on October 17, 1873, _nonum in annum_, after the Horatian
counsel, the prodigious masterpiece, _Emperor and Galilean_, was
published in Copenhagen at last.

Of all the writings of Ibsen, his huge double drama on the rise and
fall of Julian is the most extensive and the most ambitious. It is not
difficult to understand what it was about the most subtle and the most
speculative of the figures which animate the decline of antiquity
that fascinated the imagination of Ibsen. Successive historians have
celebrated the flexibility of intelligence and firmness of purpose which
were combined in the brain of Julian with a passion for abstract beauty
and an enthusiasm for a restored system of pagan Hellenic worship.
There was an individuality about Julian, an absence of the common purple
convention, of the imperial rhetoric, which strongly commended him
to Ibsen, and in his perverse ascetic revolt against Christianity he
offered a fascinating originality to one who thought the modern
world all out of joint. As a revolutionary, Julian presented ideas of
character which could not but passionately attract the Norwegian poet.
His attitude to his emperor and to his God, sceptical, in each case,
in each case inspired by no vulgar motive but by a species of lofty and
melancholy fatalism, promised a theme of th