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their own there is a natural and deadly antagonism. Further, they believe that the other class hold the same view, and act upon it. In justification of this latter belief they point to such facts as the hesitation of English ministers to say decisively whether or not Communists flying to England would be treated as criminals or refugees; the manner in which English newspapers spoke of the Communists as a handful of ruffians, bloodthirsty scoundrels, and so forth, and the cold-blooded murdering of the Communist prisoners without any form of trial.

If the feeling of the working classes of Paris upon this latter point may be judged by that of the working classes of this country, it may be safely said that the deaths of those prisoners will never be either forgotten or forgiven until they are avenged. The soldiers of the Commune, it is held, showed practically that their view of duty

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Like men to fight,

And hero-like to die;

but instead of being treated as prisoners of war, their blood was shed as that of beasts; and if ever an opportunity comes-and it will be closely watched for-the shedding of it will be repaid in kind. The officers and gentlemen' who ordered or allowed this butchers' work have sown the seeds of a harvest that their class are, in all probability, destined to reap in blood. The Commune has only been scotched, not killed. Its essential elements are left alive, and they will breed and brood, and under that name, or some other, break forth again.

The existence among the working classes of such opinions as those we have been speaking of is a thing that should be heedfully noted by society. Mr. Gladstone has expressed his belief that such opinions had only to be left unnoticed to sink

into that oblivion which was their destined and their proper portion.' Whether or not oblivion is their 'proper portion' is a question that need not be discussed here; but leaving them unnoticed will certainly not make it their destined portion, and, with the Communist war staring the world in the face, it is wonderful how a really great statesman could think that it would. No person, we suppose, will attempt to argue that the Communist rising was the result of any hasty plot or mere passing impulse. The spirit. and opinion that made it possible must have been existing and intensifying for years. As they were shared by millions, they must have been known to those opposed to them; and it can therefore only be concluded that they had been left unnoticed in the hope that they would sink, and ultimately in the belief that they had sunk, into oblivion. Otherwise it is impossible to account for Jules Favre making the fatal condition that the National Guard should be left armed; or the fact of the Thiers' Government being so ill-prepared for the rising, so slow to comprehend its extent after it had taken place. The policy of leaving unnoticed is a dangerous as well as a mistaken one. Those who won't see in such matters become in time those who cannot see, and they mistake the sinking into lethargy of their own perceptions for the sinking into ob livion of the opinions to which they are opposed.

That the views both of the French Communists and the English working classes are to a considerable extent chimerical is, of course, obvious to those who possess a comprehensive knowledge of political economy; but, unfortunately for themselves, the working classes have not this knowledge. They do not see that a mere reconstruction of present society on grounds more favourable to the interests of labour is really

in the same category with, though upon a larger scale than, those measures which have proved to them, in comparison with their anticipation, a sort of Dead Sea fruit. They imagine that there could be a form of government by means of which the labouring classes could be raised to and maintained in a position of material comfort. They fail to see that any form of government can only be part of a scheme of social regeneration; that to depend on that alone is to overlook fundamental principles not only of political economy, but of nature; principles that would speedily override every temporary expedient in the way of changed forms of government. But even those who can see that the working classes make the disastrous mistake of imagining a part, a mere detail, to be the whole, must admit that there is much in their ideas that to little-educated people must appear plausible; while at least some of these ideas are certainly founded on principles of justice. It is the plausible portions that catch the minds of the work

ing classes. Though there is undoubtedly much that is wrong in their ideas, they do not see it, and consequently the ideas are in their minds practically operative as fully right and just, and in their being so regarded lies the chief point of the whole matter as it affects society. It is the one great reason why the opinions should be made known, and why they should not be left unnoticed. To ignore them is not the way to deal with them, or prevent their culminating in violence. Those who would consign them to oblivion should show themselves willing to concede the parts of them that are just, and seek to qualify those holding them to understand that the other parts are erroneous. It is the duty of those in power to so deal with them. If they neglect this duty, or wilfully shut their eyes to the fact that such opinions largely prevail and are still spreading among the working classes, the responsibility will in a great measure be upon our rulers if ever we see such wild work in England as there has lately been in France.

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ERASMUS MONTANUS: AN OLD DANISH COMEDY. TRANSLATED (WITH A SHORT SKETCH OF HOLBERG'S LIFE) BY PETER Toft.

UDWIG HOLBERG, the father of the Danish Comedy and the creator, it may be said, of modern Danish literature, which he was the first to stamp with a thoroughly national character, was born in Bergen in Norway (then united to Denmark) in the year 1684. His father, a colonel in the army, intended him for the military profession, and Holberg was inscribed as cadet; but his father's death occurring soon after, he abandoned an uncongenial profession and went to Copenhagen to study theology. Obtaining a small curacy in Norway, he eked out his miserable stipend by private tuition, and after a while managed to store up a little sum of money, wherewith to gratify his ambition of seeing foreign countries. He visited Holland and France, but want of means compelled him after a short absence to return to Copenhagen, where he earned a modest support as teacher of languages. He afterwards went abroad again. While in England in 1707 he pursued his studies at the University of Oxford, in whose library he collected the materials for his first historical works. He became a great favourite among the students there, who exerted themselves to procure him tuition in foreign languages and in music, Holberg being a very clever performer on the flute. To his sojourn in England, although his stinted means often entailed upon him no few privations, he always alluded afterwards with pleasure and satisfaction. Returning home, he engaged in literature as a profession, and some historical pamphlets from his pen attracting the favourable attention of the Danish Government, he received an appointment as

Extraordinary Professor at the Copenhagen University. During a subsequent two years' residence in Paris he made himself intimately acquainted with the comic and satirical literature of France. Upon his return he was appointed to the chair of Metaphysics. About this time he wrote his first satirical poem, Peter Paars, a mock heroic epic in Iambic

verse.

It being in contemplation to found a national theatre, public attention was naturally directed to the author of Peter Paars, and it was owing to the solicitations of his patron and friend, Count Danneskjold-Samsö, that Holberg first commenced to write for the stage, whose repertoire he enriched with some thirty comedies and plays, many of which are still popular, and are performed every season to appreciating audiences by the company of the Theatre Royal in Copenhagen, a body of admirably trained actors, on whom more especially devolves the duty of performing the Holbergian Comedy in its true spirit and according to the received tradition. The principal are: The Political Tinker (1722); The Irresolute (1722); Jean de France (1722); Jeppe, or The Transformed Peasant (1722); Geert Westphaler, or The Talkative Barber (1723); The Eleventh of June (1723); The Lying-in Room (1724); The Masquerade (1724); Jacob von Thybo, or The Braggadocio Soldier (1724); Ulysses von Ithaca (1726); Henrick and Pernille (1726); The Busy Idler (1732); Erasmus Montanus (1748); Abracadabra (1748). Of his satirical works the most famous is The Journey to the World Underground, being the Subterranean Travels of Niels Kliem, which has

been translated into

many languages. The original is written in Latin, and an English version of the poem was published in 1828. Of his Latin Essay, An Introduction to Universal History, an English translation appeared as far back as 1758. Other and less known works of Holberg are-A History of the Jews; Parallel Biographies of Famous Men and Women, in the style of Plutarch; A History of Denmark; and A Universal History of the Church.

His writings gained him not alone fame and honours, but also considerable wealth, the whole of which he bequeathed to the Knightly Academy of Soroe, a collegiate institution holding the same rank in Denmark as that of Eton in England. He was installed Rector of the University, became ennobled with the title of Baron, and died in 1754:

Holberg is one of the world's great satirists. His comedies, upon which his present fame now principally rests, are the result of two factors his own genius, and the study of the famous comic writers of antiquity and of France; and in this respect he permitted himself the same liberty as all his European predecessors in the same walk of literature. Occasionally he adopts a central point of plot of an elder comedy, or he imitates some single scene: more frequently he borrows some apposite reply or witty rejoinder from some old playwright, pleading, as Molière did when taxed with similar appropriations: I merely claim my own, wherever I find it.' Of the classical writers of comedy, Holberg preferred Plautus to Terence; and his Abracadabra, the least original of his plays and written in his old age, is a direct adaptation of Plautus's Mostellaria. The poetical character of Holberg is very different from that of Molière. The court poet and dramatic satirist of

a large and wealthy capital demanded and obtained materials of a different calibre from those needed by the popular satirist of a Northern capital, which indeed aped some of the fashions of, but neither in good nor evil could measure itself with, the great centre of civilisation. Holberg is essentially a democratic poet. He seldom deals with characters from the upper ranks, but delights to paint to the life the well-to-do burghers of Copenhagen, and their attempts at secondhand imitation of the airs and habits of the great-the manners and foibles of provincials, and the obtuseness and coarseness of the yeomen and peasantry of his period and country, all of which he rendered with great gusto and with such fidelity to nature, that Oelenschläger, the modern Danish dramatist, says somewhere, that if Copenhagen should be swallowed up by an earthquake, and the Comedies of Holberg be exhumed from its ruins in future ages, the period of the author would be as plainly read in any of these works as that of the Romans from the remains of Pompeii. Holberg differed also from his famous predecessor in being a man of learning, while Molière was essentially the man of the world. But with all his erudition and respect. for real learning, no satirist since Lucian has wielded a more caustic pen against pedantry and scholastic affectation than Holberg. The conception, or at any rate the portrayal, of great passions, or the mental state, resulting from deep soul emotions, was equally foreign to the genius of Holberg, and he carefully abstains from any attempt at rendering them. Love, also, in the Holbergian Comedy is a very subordinate part, is only used as a spur to the intrigue and action of the play, and is never the central point of interest around which the rest is grouped. His lovers, as such, are indeed poor sticks, and the dia

logues between them but an exchange of inanities and stiff compliments.

In his Erasmus Montanus the pretensions and affectation of a conceited scholastic fencer, and his utter discomfiture by a set of thickheaded rustics, constitute the gist of a

comedy, of which I have attempted a translation, by way of giving English readers some idea of the comic power of a writer whose productions still delight audiences in the three Northern kingdoms, as they have done for more than one hundred years.

PETER TOFT.

ERASMUS MONTANUS, OR RASMUS BERG.

A COMEDY IN FIVE ACTS, FIRST PERFORMED ON THE ROYAL DANISH STAGE IN THE

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learned folks have for each other. They can't abide that another should have learning as well as themselves. Now Peer Clerk is a fine fellow, and gives us mighty good sermons. He can preach about envy and all kinds of uncharitableness2 in such a way that the tears come in a fellow's eyes, but for all that I am not sure that he is altogether without these failings himself. I can't understand such feelings at all: if one should say that my neighbour is a better farmer than myself, should I therefore hate my neighbour? No, no; Jeppe Berg is not so mean as that-but, faith, here comes the clerk himself.

SCENE II.

Jeppe, Peer Clerk.

Jeppe. Welcome home again, Peer!

Peer. Thank you, Jeppe Berg. Jeppe. Ah! my good Peer, I wish you could explain some Latin which stands in my son's letter.

An estate, the rents of which were drawn by the professors, but which are now paid to the University of Copenhagen.

The clerk sometimes delivered discourses in the absence of the clergyman.

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