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down the chief barriers of church doctrine. But he acknowledged
the necessity of bold criticism; and Addison and Swift were
writers after his own mind. At the age of 25, he was once more
in Copenhagen, filled with a desire to brighten a little the quiet
world at home. By some treatises in the style of Pufendorf,
he gained a footing at the university, and by the aid of a
scholarship was enabled to go to Paris, and even to Rome. Here the
quiet book-worm chanced upon the modern descendants of his
favourites, Plautus and Terence—Molière and the commedia dell’arte.
When he was once more at home, and had to teach scholastic
metaphysics, the situation became too ironical for the modern
man; by a chance academical polemic, he discovered his slumbering
talent for satire; and writh explosive force, his gay Norwegian
nature suddenly burst forth. One day in the year 1719, «Peder
Paars» flew abroad over sedate Copenhagen, producing an
outburst of laughter and displeasure by its merry Alexandrines, and
their gay travesties of everthing and everybody.
It was the birth of the modern Dano-Norwegian muse, who
came into the world with a smile upon her lips.
A year or two later, the first Danish theatre was opened in
Denmark’s capital; and in the six years during which this stage
managed to sustain itself in spite of the indifference of the court,
and the partiality of the common people for German farces, it
succeeded in representing no less than twenty of our professor’s
original comedies. Having once begun, he threw off picture after
picture of the follies of the time, each more mirthful than the
other. To this very day these pieces are acted amid general
acclamation, so vividly do they conjure up the society of those
days, with all the comicalities of the rococo age, glaringly
illuminated by the earnest gaiety of a far-seeing observer. A bundle of
new plays lay completed when the failure of the theatre, and
shortly after the triumph of pietism at the court, put a sudden
stop to the prolific genius’s opportunity of making use of the
stage.
One would imagine that such a blow as this would paralyse
the productive impulse of so pronounced a genius. But Holberg
did not despond. He remained true to his beloved calling of
teacher of the people, but had to turn his talent to neutral
territory. In the mean time he had changed his subject at the
university, and now held a historical chair; and, as he felt no
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