extent.

The first of these was a type of the student of the time. Vilsing was
from Jutland, tall, dark, neither handsome nor plain, remarkable for his
unparalleled facility in speaking. He owed his universal popularity to
the fact that at students' Parties he could at any time stand up and
rattle off at a furious rate an apparently unprepared speech, a sort of
stump speech in which humorous perversions, distortions, lyric remarks,
clever back-handed blows to right and left, astonishing incursions and
rapid sorties, were woven into a whole so good that it was an
entertaining challenge to common sense.

The starting point, for instance, might be some travesty of Sibbern's
whimsical definition of life, which at that time we all had to learn by
heart for the examination. It ran:

"Life altogether is an activity and active process, preceding from an
inner source and working itself out according to an inner impulse,
producing and by an eternal change of matter, reproducing, organising
and individualising, and, since it by a certain material or substratum
constitutes itself a certain exterior, within which it reveals itself,
it simultaneously constitutes itself as the subsisting activity and
endeavour in this, its exterior, of which it may further be inquired how
far a soul can be said to live and subsist in it, as a living entity--
appearing in such a life."

It is not difficult to conceive what delightful nonsense this barbaric
elucidation might suggest, if a carouse, or love, woman or drunkenness
were defined in this vein; and he would weave in amusing attacks on
earlier, less intrepid speakers, who, as Vilsing put it, reminded one of