the trilogy (as he then planned it) on the story of Julian the Apostate. At last Brandes came to Dresden (July, 1871) and found the tenebrous poet plunged in the study of Neander and Strauss, Gibbon unfortunately being a sealed book to him. All through the autumn and winter he was kept in a chronic state of irritability by the intrigues and the menaces of a Norwegian pirate, who threatened to reprint, for his own profit, Ibsen’s early and insufficiently protected writings. This exacerbated the poet’s dislike to his own country, where the very law courts, he thought, were hostile to him. On this subject he used language of tiresome over-emphasis. “From Sweden, from Denmark, from Germany, I hear nothing but what gives me pleasure; it is from Norway that everything bad comes upon me.” It was indicated to would-be Norwegian visitors that they were not welcome at Dresden. Norwegian friends, he said, were “a costly luxury” which he was obliged to deny himself.
The First Part of Julian was finished on Christmas Day, but it took over a year more before the entire work, as we now possess it, was completed. “A Herculean labor,” the author called it, when he finally laid down a weary pen in February, 1873. The year 1872 had been very
