had been made to use the Norwegian idiom and to train native actors, but
it had been to no avail. The play-going public liked their plays to be
Danish, and even nationalists of a pronounced species could not deny
that dramas, like the great historical tragedies of Oehlenschlaeger, many
of which dealt enthusiastically with legends that were peculiarly
Norwegian, were as national as it was possible for poems by a foreign
poet to be. All this time, it must be remembered, Christiania was to
Copenhagen as Dublin till lately was to London, or as New York was half
a century ago. It is in the arts that the old colonial instinct of
dependence is most loath to disappear.

The party of the nationalists, however, had been steadily increasing in
activity, and the universal quickening of patriotic pulses in 1848 had
not been without its direct action upon Norway.

Nevertheless, for various reasons of internal policy, there was perhaps
no country in Europe where this period of seismic disturbance led to
less public turmoil than precisely here in the North. The accession of a
new king, Oscar I, in 1844, had been followed by a sense of renewed
national security; the peasants were satisfied that the fresh reign
would be favorable to their rights and liberties; and the monarch showed
every inclination to leave his country of Norway as much as possible to
its own devices. The result of all this was that '48 left no mark on the
internal history of the country, and the fever which burned in youthful
bosoms was mainly, if not entirely, intellectual and transcendental. The
young Catiline from Grimstad, therefore, met with several sympathetic
rebels, but found nobody willing to conspire. But what he did find is so
important in the consideration of his future development that it is
needful briefly to examine it.