lessons, described the poet afterwards as "a quiet boy with a pair of
wonderful eyes, but with no sort of cleverness except an unusual gift
for drawing." Hansen taught Ibsen Latin and theology, gently,
perseveringly, without any striking results; that the pupil afterwards
boasted of having successfully perused Phaedrus in the original is in
itself significant. So little was talent expected from him that when, at
the age of about fifteen, he composed a rather melodramatic description
of a dream, the schoolmaster looked at him gloomily, and said he must
have copied it out of some book! One can imagine the shocked silence of
the author, "passive at the nadir of dismay."

No great wild swan of the flocks of Phoebus ever began life as a more
ungainly duckling than Ibsen did. The ingenuity of biographers has done
its best to brighten up the dreary record of his childhood with
anecdotes, yet the sum of them all is but a dismal story. The only
talent which was supposed to lurk in the napkin was that for painting. A
little while before he left school, he was found to have been working
hard with water-colors. Various persons have recalled finished works of
the young Ibsen--a romantic landscape of the ironworks at Fossum, a view
from the windows at Venstoeb, a boy in peasant dress seated on a rock,
the latter described by a dignitary of the church as "awfully splendid,"
overmaade praegtigt. One sees what kind of painting this must have been,
founded on some impression of Fearnley and Tidemann, a far-away
following of the new "national" art of the praiseworthy "patriot-
painters" of the school of Dahl.

It is interesting to remember that Pope, who had considerable
intellectual relationship with Ibsen, also nourished in childhood the
ambition to be a painter, and drudged away at his easel for weeks and
months. As he to the insipid Jervases and Knellers whom he copied, so