inculcating them upon his readers, who has just rounded out
his scriptural tale of three score years and ten, and, in
commemoration of the anniversary, is now made the recipient
of such a tribute of grateful and whole-souled admiration
as few men have ever won, and none have better deserved.
It would be certainly invidious, and probably futile, to
attempt a nice, comparative estimate of the services of these
three men to the common cause of humanity; let us be content
with the admission that Bjornstjerne Bjornson is _primus inter
pares_, and make no attempt to exalt him at the expense of his
great contemporaries. Writing now eight years later, at the
time when Bjornson's death has plunged his country and the
world in mourning, it is impressive to note that of the five men
constituting the group above designated, Tolstoy alone survives
to carry on the great literary tradition of the nineteenth century.

It will be well, however, to make certain distinctions between
the life work of Bjornson and that of the two men whom a common
age and common aims bring into inevitable association with him.
These distinctions are chiefly two,--one of them is that while
Tolstoy and Ibsen grew to be largely cosmopolitan in their outlook,
Bjornson has much more closely maintained throughout his career the
national, or, at any rate, the racial standpoint. The other is
that while Tolstoy and Ibsen presently became, the one indifferent
to artistic expression, and the other baldly prosaic where he was
once deeply poetical, Bjornson preserved the poetic impulse of his
youth, and continued to give it play even in his envisagement of
the most practical modern problems. Let us enlarge a little upon
these two themes. Ernest Renan, speaking at the funeral of
Tourguenieff, described the deceased novelist as "the incarnation