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 brood the storms of autumn.

Nor, as regards the characters, the action, and the contents of
the plays generally, is there any other or any greater resemblance
between them than that which is a natural consequence of the
derivation of the subjects of both from the narrow circle of
ideas in which the ancient ballads move.