otomanm - 



OEHLENSCH LAGER, ADAM OOTTLOB. 



HI 



. Christian!* Confwsio.' Mosheim styles him " one uf the most 

 i men of that century ;" he wu no IBM distinguished for his 



jy, metknesi, charity, and self-denial ; and he wu one of the 



principal instrument* in planting the Reformation successfully and 

 rarely in Switzerland. 



(KCfMK'XIUS was bishop of Tricca in Thessaly. The time at 

 which he lived i* uncertain : but it was after the 8th century and 

 before the 10th. He is generally placed in the 9th century; Cave 

 sign* to him the date A.D. 990, Lardner A.D. 950. He wrote com- 

 menUrie* on the Act*, on SL Paul's fourteen Epistles, on the seven 

 Catholic epistles, and on the Apocalypse, in the form which is called 

 a Catena ' (chain), that is, containing, besides his own observations, 

 the remarks of other writers. Among tho authors thus quoted by him 

 are Chryaostom, Cyril of Alexandria, Gregory of Nazi.mEus, Isidore of 

 I'elusiuin, Theodoret, and Photius. The best editions of his works are 

 thoM of Verona, 1582, and Paris, 1631. (Monfaucon, BMivllieca 

 CoMiniana, pref. and p. 274 ; Fabricius, Sib. Gnec., torn. vii. p. 788 ; 

 xiit p. 845; Cave, lliit. Lit., torn. ii. p. 112; Lardner, Credibility, in 

 Work*, vol. v. p. 154, ed. of 1831 ; Cramer, ifonitum ad Catenam in 

 JSpiH. CatkoL, Oxford, 1840.) 



OKHLEXSCHLAGER, ADAM GOTTLOB, the greatest poet of 

 Scandinavia and one of the greatest European poets of the 19th cen- 

 tury, was born on the 14th of November 1779 at Vesterbro a suburb 

 of Copenhagen. The whole of his early life was recorded by himself 

 with singular minuteness, first in an autobiography written to be 

 prefixed to a German edition of his works and afterwards in a series 

 of ' Erindringcr ' or 'Recollections' which were published immediately 

 after his death by his eldest ton. The reader is informed in the ' Erin- 

 dringer' of the boy's first inclination to swear, and how his mother 

 checked it, of his strong propensity to pull off the bed-clothes, and n 

 variety of Mmilar particulars, the whole of which put together supply 

 a varied picture of the life of a Danish boy at the close of the 18th 

 century. 



The name of Oehlcnschliiger is German, his father waa from Krusen- 

 dorf, a village in Sleswig, where the family had produced a long 

 succes-iou of schoolmasters and organists; and bin mother Martha 

 Maria Hannen was of German parentage by the father's ride, of Danish 

 by the mother's. " Thus," says Oehlenschliiger, " I am descended from 

 both Danes and Germans, and it seems as if Fate had determined I 

 should belong to both nations." His father had fallen much below 

 the respectability of his ancestry by becoming a servant to Count 

 Adam Gottlob Moltke, after whom the poet was named, but on his 

 marriage with the countess's lady's-maid he obtained by the count's 

 patronage the post of organist at Frederiksberg, and afterwards of 

 some subordinate position at the castle of that name, where ho finally 

 ro*e to be steward. Frederiksberg, one of the numerous palaces of the 

 king of Denmark, n bnilding which is said by some to have been 

 reeled from the plans of Inigo Jones, stand* abcut two English miles 

 from the western gates of Copenhagen, and is a favourite Sunday 

 resort of the inhabitants of the capital. Here the early life of young 

 Adam wu parsed amid scenes of great variety. In the summer 

 Frederiksberg wu often occupied by tho court, and he heard the 

 royal band of music play on Sundays, and saw the royal company at 

 dinner. In the autumn the place of tho court was supplied by a 

 legion of workpeople, busy with repairs; and in the winter the build- 

 ing wu left in charge of the Oehlenschliiger family, with, in addition, 

 two watchmen and two watchdogs. " The whole palace," says Oehlen- 

 schliiger, " then belonged to us, and I went about in the royal rooms, 

 looking at the paintings and building castles in the air." His chief 

 amusement in the winter wu reading novels, which he got from a 

 circulating library in Copenhagen, and of which he tells us that before 

 he wu twelve yean old he had got through more than three hundred 

 volume*. All that he read wu Danish circumstance to which he 

 partly attributes the mastery he obtained over his native tongue. 

 Hit parent*, though German wu their native language, never used it 

 to their children, and only one to another when they did not wish the 

 children to understand them. 



Up to the age of twelve, young Adam had been very unfortunate 

 in the. article of schools; he wu then taken notice of by Edward 

 Storm, a Norwegian poet, who offered to his father to procure him 

 gratuitous admission to a public school in Copenhagen, if his father 

 would k at the charge of his board. Young Adam soon began to 

 write not only verse* but even plays, which were acted by himself, 

 hi* filter, and some play-fcllowi, on Sundays, in one of the rooms at 

 Fr*derikberg. Storm, who wu superintendent of the school to which 

 the boy bad been admitted, laughed at hi* attempt* ; and Dichmann, 

 another Norwegian, who wu one of the muter*, told him, to his great 

 mortification, that he wu no genius he would never be another 

 Edward Storm. The education he received wa* intended to qualify 

 him for a m< raantile life, bat when he left the school at the age of 

 sixteen he wu glad of an accident which prevented his being placed 

 in a counting-house, and readily persuaded hi* indulgent father, who 

 wu now In much better circumstance* than he had been, to allow 

 him to study. In a year however he wu tired of Greek and Latin, 

 and having for some months spent all his spare time and money at the 

 theatre, wu seized with a desire to appear on the stage. Theatrical 

 matters are generally looked upon in a more serious light in a foreign 

 city than in an English one, and at Copenhagen the management of 



the drama was treated with unusual solemnity. In Kahbek's Lectures 

 on the Drama, delivered to the actors, the stage is regarded as a moral 

 engine hardly secondary in importance to the pulpit With the 

 exception of the comedies of Holbcrg, the Danish Moliei-o film 

 the plays that were performed were then chiefly translation*. " Of 

 English pieces," says Oehlenschliiger; "the 'School for Scandal' 

 pleased me much, in which Hosing was an excellent Sir Joseph [Joseph 

 Surface ?], nnd ' She Stoops to Conquer,' in which Gielstrup was an 

 incomparable Tony Lumpkin." He soon found however that he wu 

 not likely to rise to a much higher position than that of a \\alking 

 gentleman, and the acquaintance of two young students, who had taken 

 lodgings with the same landlady as himself, led him into a different 

 line. They were the two brothers Oersted, afterwards so well known. 

 Of the three young men who occupied together for some year 

 obscure lodgings, one, Oehlenschliiger, became the greatest poet of 

 Denmark ; another, Hans Oersted, became its greatest natural philo- 

 sopher, and the discoverer of electro-magnetism ; the third, Anders 

 Oersted, who married Oehlenschliiger's sister, became its greatest 

 lawyer, and for a time the prime-minister of the kingdom. <>< 

 schluger infected the future lawyer with a love of poetry, and the 

 lawyer infected him with a taste for jurisprudence. With the consent 

 of his father he relinquished the stage, and entered himself at tho 

 University of Copenhagen as a student of law, his frieud promising his 

 assistance to help him on a little more rapidly than usual. Literature 

 however soon won the victory over law. The university offered in 

 1800 a prize for an essay on the subject, ' Would it be an advantage 

 for northern literature if the Scandinavian mythology were ma 

 of in it instead of the Grecian." It was the very idea which was taking 

 possession of Oehlenschliiger, and was destined to occupy him for life ; 

 but when be drew up an essay he had the mortification to see the 

 prize carried off by another receiving himself however the honour of 

 being declared the second best. 



On the famous 2nd of April 1801 when Nelson attacked the Danish 

 fleet off Copenhagen, Oehlenschliiger saw the fight at a short distance 

 from the balcony of the Sea-Cadets' Academy, and he afterwards held 

 the post of ensign in a volunteer regiment of students. He also pub- 

 lished a small dramatic piece, ' The Second of April ; ' but it was of 

 no great merit. " That battle," he wrote, several years afterwards, 

 " inspired tho Danes with a taste for poetry, as the battles of Marathon 

 and Salamis did the Greeks, and the destruction of the Spanish 

 Armada tfie English in the time of Elizabeth. Some great develop- 

 ment of power is requisite to drive the mean, the petty, and parochial 

 out of a nation's mind, and bring it in tune for the great and 

 beautiful." lu 1803 he issued a volume of poems, containing among 

 other works, the play of ' The Eve of Saint John,' and at once took 

 rank as a writer of some note. The play, or rather dramatic tale, of 

 ' Aladdin,' which followed, founded on the well-known story in the 

 ' Arabian Nights,' captivated the public, in spite of some very obvious 

 faults, by the general vivacity of it* tone, and raised his name very 

 high in the list of tho living Danish poets, if it did not jilac t him at 

 their bead. He used often to say afterwards that in v, 

 'Aladdin' he hod discovered his own ' wonderful lamp,' the v 

 poetry which was to give him fame and fortune. He received i; 

 the usual mark of success for a Danish author a travelling > 

 from the government, procured for him by Count Schimnielniann, 

 and set out on a tour to Germany, to make the acquaintance of tin- 

 band of literary men who at that time invested Germany with a halo. 

 The second volume of his autobiography is chiefly occupied with an 

 account of his travels, and of his intercourse with Gothe, Wit-land, 

 Tieck, Hegel, Voss, and other poets and philosophers. Up to bis 

 twenty-fourth year he bad never written a line of German, but he was 

 now so anxious to impart to bis new and illustrious friends some 

 notion of his poetical capacity that he translated his new compositions 

 into German as fast as he wrote them, and somewhat unnecessarily 

 occupied the time of many of them by availing himself of the per- 

 mission to read his productions to them in manuscript, and take Htttr 

 opinion not only on the merits or defects of the structure and the. 

 poetry, but on the correctness or incorrectness of the language. It 

 is not a little singular that productions to thoroughly Scandinavian 

 in their tone and spirit as tho earliest of the long line of Oehlen- 

 scbliiger's northern tragedies should have been written in a foreign land 

 and partly composed in a foreign tongue. ' Hakon Jarl ' was written at 

 Halle. It is a tragedy iu five acts, on the fortunes of Hakon Jarl, 

 the last pagan sovereign of Norway, and the struggle between the 

 two religions, Christianity and the belief in Odin. Nothing con well 

 be more different than a tragedy of the old French school and such a 

 tragedy as 'Hakon Jarl.' As the reader of Ivanhoe ' finds himself, 

 before he hu arrived at the end of the narrative, not only interested 

 in the fortunes of Wilfrid and Kowena, but also well-informed and 

 perhaps not less interested in the whole framework of the country 

 around them, cognU ant of the relative position of the Normans and 

 Saxons, of the enmity between the king and the Templars, of tho 

 ceremonies of a tournament and an ordeal, of the condition of serfs 

 and Jews, so the reader of ' Hakon Jarl ' sees pass before him the old 

 tyrant superstitiously clinging to the wild religion of Valhalla, the 

 young champion eager for the triumph of tho Cross, tho rudu but 

 independent Norwegian boor, the crouching northern slave, tho 

 ambitious serf who carelessly espouses the new faith because it 



