Wergeland, Welhaven, Munch, and Moe among the former, Björnson, Ibsen,
Kjelland, and Lie among the latter, were, as far as Englishmen were
concerned, "to fortune and to fame unknown." All this has been changed;
sportsmen now complain that it becomes more difficult every year to hire
rivers. Tourists swarm over the country from the Naze to the North Cape.
Ibsen's dramas are played in London theatres, and his novels, and those
of Björnson and Lie, are read in Germany and in France, as well as in
England and America.

These three writers are of nearly the same age. Ibsen was born in 1828,
at Skien on the south-eastern coast of Norway; Björnson in the
Dovrefjeld in 1832; and Lie at Eker, near Drammen, in 1833. Five years
after his son's birth, Lie's father was appointed sheriff of Tromsö,
which lies within the Arctic Circle, and young Jonas Lauritz Edemil Lie,
to give him his full name, spent six of the most impressionable years of
his life at that remote port. There he heard from the sailors many
strange tales of romantic adventure and of hazardous escape from
shipwreck, with the not uncommon result that he wished to be a sailor
himself. He was, therefore, sent to the naval school at Fredriksværn;
but his defective eyesight proved fatal to the realisation of his wish
and the idea of a seafaring life had to be given up. He was removed from
Fredriksværn to the Latin School at Bergen, and in 1851 entered the
University of Christiania, where he made the acquaintance of Ibsen and
Björnson. He graduated in law in 1857, and shortly afterwards began to
practise at Konsvinger, a little town in Hamar's Stift between Lake
Miosen and the frontier of Sweden. Clients were not numerous or
profitable at Konsvinger; Lie found time to write for the newspapers and
became a frequent contributor to some of the Christiania journals.
Meantime, Ibsen and Björnson were becoming famous in Norway, and in 1865
Lie, perhaps in a spirit of emulation, decided to abandon law for