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ner harbor. Later came the Dutchmen, and then the Hansa merchants. 
In Holberg’s time it was common for citizens of Bergen to send their 
sons abroad. It was generally the poorer boys who went to the Uni¬ 
versity of Copenhagen, while the sons of wealthy merchants more often 
went to sea in their father’s ships, saw foreign parts, and learned sea¬ 
manship, before they came home to be taken into the parental business. 
It was no wonder that this set its stamp on them, and that they acquired 
a sense of realities foreign to all pedantic learning. “Bookish arts,” 
as Holberg called them, were in Bergen but little respected. The Ber¬ 
gen people had a keen sense of humor, said what came to their minds 
without respect of persons, and recked little to whom they gave a lick 
with the rough side of their tongue. They knew how to hit the bull’s 
eye in repartee, and no matter how good a case might be, if it had a 
ridiculous feature, it was doomed from the start. They would be abso¬ 
lutely merciless and never took time to investigate farther. They shone 
in debate; in the course of time, a great many clever debaters have 
come out of Bergen, men who have won distinction in political life less 
by the soundness of their arguments than by their brilliant fencing with 
words. No one could stand against their cascades of bright ideas and 
exuberant humor. 
In this we recognize Holberg, and his spirit hovers over the city— 
or rather, the traits which he had in common with his townspeople are 
still alive among them. Any one who wishes to understand Holberg 
ought to study the temperament of his native city. It is not too far¬ 
fetched to say that climatic conditions have had some influence on it. 
The climate is one of incessant changes. A stranger will no doubt feel 
oppressed by the notorious Bergen rain, which sometimes shuts off the 
view for days together, but then, all of a sudden, the sun breaks through 
the clouds and reveals a landscape of such magic beauty that we rarely 
see its equal. And the people, too, pass lightly from sunshine to gloom. 
Optimists always, they make the most of every happy moment and 
shrug their shoulders when the evil days come. “After rain comes sun¬ 
shine.” Therefore they bend, but seldom break. They can adapt them¬ 
selves to straitened circumstances and be content with little, but when 
the wind is in a favorable quarter, they hoist all sails and fly before 
the breeze. Gay and prodigal when Fortune smiles on them, they are 
equally plucky in adversity. Then they suffer want, if need be, and 
wait for the wind to change again. 
A Danish scholar has said that if Copenhagen were to be leveled 
with the ground and forgotten for centuries, as Pompeii was, and if 
some one were to dig up a copy of Holberg’s comedies, the Copenhagen 
of his day could be reconstructed from them, so vivid are they. Such 
a statement sounds clever, and there is, of course, much truth in it, but 
it needs to be qualified. The picture that would result from such a 
reconstruction would not be quite correct. It would reveal a person- 
