e young critical Jeronimuses of Christiania encounter such
a monstrosity in any new verse, they were as certain as their
prototype in Holberg to shout their "Hoity-toity! the world will
not last till Easter!"

The origin of another peculiar characteristic of the criticism then
prevalent in the Norwegian capital was long a puzzle to me. Every
time a new author published a book or had a little play acted, our
critics were in the habit of flying into an ungovernable passion
and behaving as if the publication of the book or the performance
of the play were a mortal insult to themselves and the newspapers
in which they wrote. As already remarked, I puzzled long over this
peculiarity. At last I got to the bottom of the matter. Whilst
reading the Danish _Monthly Journal of Literature_ I was struck by
the fact that old State-Councillor Molbech was invariably seized
with a fit of rage when a young author published a book or had a
play acted in Copenhagen.

Thus, or in a manner closely resembling this, had the tribunal
qualified itself, which now, in the daily press, summoned _The
Feast at Solhoug_ to the bar of criticism in Christiania. It was
principally composed of young men who, as regards criticism, lived
upon loans from various quarters. Their critical thought had long
ago been thought and expressed by others; their opinions had long
ere now been formulated elsewhere. Their aesthetic principles were
borrowed; their critical method was borrowed; the polemical tactics
they employed were borrowed in every particular, great and small.
Their very frame of mind was borrowed. Borrowing, borrowing, here,
there, and everywhere! The single original thing about them was
that they invariably made a wrong and unseasonable application of
their borrowings.

It can surprise no one that this body, the members of which, as
critics, supported themselves by borrowing, should have presupposed
similar action on my part, as author. Two, possibly more than
two, of the newspapers promptly discovered that I had borrowed
this, that, and the other thing form Henrik Hertz's play, _Svend
Dyring's House_.

This is a baseless and indefensible critical assertion. It is
evidently to be ascribed to the fact that the metre of the ancient
ballads is employed in both plays. But my tone is quite different
from Hertz's; the language of my play has a different ring; a
light summer breeze plays over the rhythm of my verse: over that
or Hertz's br