Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/108

Rh  precision, they are singularly cold in colour and void of imagination. Marstrand (1810-1875) was by far the most richly-gifted of the pupils of Eckersberg; his best works are full of brilliant qualities, and would command admiration in any country. Sonne (born 1801) has made himself a name by painting a series of large canvases representing the victories of the Danish people in 1848, and their misfortunes in 1864. He has tenderness and a skill in composition that make up for the absence of greater gifts. Vermehren (born 1823) has shown an eminent talent in depicting the Danes in their country-life, at serious or mournful occasions; he carries stiffness and reserve to their greatest excess. Exner (born 1825) is far more genial and charming, a genre-painter of a high order, full of delicate fancy, and rejoicing in sunlight, humour, and soft gay colours. He has produced a large number of studies of the fast-disappearing habits and dresses peculiar to the peasants. Dalsgaard (born 1824) has followed the practice of Marstrand with originality and success. Skovgaard was the most eminent Danish landscape painter. Among the more recent artists the most powerful is Carl Bloch, who has produced some very brilliant work.

In sculpture the single name of Berthel Thorwaldsen (1770-1844) has raised Denmark to a great pre-eminence. As the opponent of the smooth and effeminate style of Canova, Thorwaldsen inaugurated a true revival of the masculine spirit of the ancients. He had an extraordinary fecundity, and conceived designs with such rapidity that he almost abandoned the use of the chisel in his later years. All the works he was able to leave he bequeathed to the Danish state. The Thorwaldsen Museum, in which these works were placed, is one of the greatest attractions of the capital, and is truly a national monument. Two disciples of Thorwaldsen's continued his tradition with ability, and one with a spark of his great genius. The few works completed during the short life of Bissen prove that he possessed very considerable force and imagination. Jerichas had a milder and more common-place talent.

In architecture the Danes have little to boast of. The most picturesque buildings in Copenhagen belong to the style of Christian IV., a sort of Tudor. One of the most important, the palace of Rosenberg, was actually designed by Inigo Jones. A few cathedral churches, as those of Ribe and Viborg, deserve attention. The country towns are poorly and monotonously built.

The Danes have a great delight in music. Their first great composer was Christoph Weyse (1774-1842), who represented in music the romanticism of Oehlenschläger in poetry and Steffens in philosophy. The comic operas of Weyse are especially admired. Frederick Kuhlau (1786-1832) was a talented and a hated rival of Weyse, who put to charming music a great many of Ochlenschläger's lyrical dramas. The two most eminent living Danish composers are Hartmann (born 1805), who is allied to the latest German school, and whom Wagner has warmly commended, and Gade (born 1817), the pupil and friend of Mendelssohn, whose concerted pieces are admired and performed in all parts of Europe. Heise is the best Danish song-writer, a most imaginative and delicate musician.

 DENNIS,  (1657-1734), a critic and poet of some celebrity in his own day, was the son of a saddler in London, where he was born in the year 1657. He received the first branches of education at Harrow and at Caius College, Cambridge, from which after four years residence he removed to Trinity Hall. In 1683 he graduated M.A. When he quitted the university he made the tour of Europe, in the course of which he acquired a strong prejudice against foreign manners and customs, and became confirmed, as was natural in one born and brought up a Whig, in his dislike of foreign Governments. On his return to England he became acquainted with Dryden, Wycherly, Congreve, and Southerne, whose conversation, inspiring him with a passion for poetry, and a contempt for every attainment that had not in it something of the belles lettres, diverted him from entering any profession. He lived for a time on a small fortune he had inherited from an uncle, but this was soon squandered. Through the patronage of the duke of Marlborough, to whom he had recommended himself by his zeal for the Protestant succession, he obtained a place in the customs worth £120 per annum. After some years, however, his extravagance reduced him to the necessity of disposing of it; but, in selling it, he reserved to himself an annuity for a term of years. Outliving this term, he was in the closing years of his life reduced to extreme necessity.

Dennis was the author of several small poems of little merit, and one or two plays which possess none, though one at least of the latter was received with considerable favour at the time of its production, on account of its hitting the strongest popular prejudice then existing. His tragedy of Love Asserted, produced at Lincoln's Inn Fields theatre in 1704, was fiercely anti-French, and as such met with warm sympathy and approval. Dennis conceived the insane idea that by writing it he had roused the implacable resentment of the French Government, and amusing stories are told of the precautions he thought it necessary to take in consequence. He is said to have visited the duke of Marlborough, previous to the negotiations for the peace of Utrecht, and asked him to secure the insertion of a special clause in the treaty protecting his person from vengeance. On another occasion the appearance of an approaching vessel is said to have caused him to flee to London from a friend's house on the coast of Sussex. His tragedy of Appius and Virginia, produced at Drury Lane in 1709, was unsuccessful. It is memorable only on account of a peculiar kind of thunder used in the performance, which was both novel and effective. A few nights after the failure of his play Dennis, sitting in the pit, heard the thunder introduced into the tragedy of Macbeth, whereupon he rose and cried to the audience, “They won't act my tragedy, but they steal my thunder.”

But for his inordinate vanity, and an infirmity of temper that fell little short of insanity, Dennis might have made some mark in literature as a critic. His reviews of Pope's Essay on Man and Addison's Cato showed considerable discernment and not a little wit; but they were disfigured by bitter personal feeling. As his attacks were almost always on persons of abilities greatly superior to his own, like Addison, Steele, and Pope, their replies usually turned opinion strongly against him, irritating his testy temper, and rendering him a perpetual torment to himself. Pope pilloried him in the Dunciad, and in the following epigram—

