was simultaneously made aware that J. L. Baggesen (the author of
_Letters from the Dead_) had at a still earlier period made a
similar attack on the great author who wrote both _Axel and Valborg_
and _Hakon Jarl_.

A quantity of other information useful to a critic was to be
extracted from these writings. From them one learned, for instance,
that taste obliged a good critic to be scandalised by a hiatus.
Did the 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