Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/149

Rh quence of the Reformation, the rhymed poems of Michael were put aside as being too intimately connected with Catholicism; but a few fragments of "Virgin Mary's Rosary" were retained and were inserted, partly changed and partly without alteration, in the Lutheran psalm-book. Even at the present time several of them are found in the evangelical psalm-books of the Danish church. The poem on human life was in 1571 again brought to light by Anders Vedel and edited by him.

The collection of proverbs by is a work in which poetry and prose, Latin and Danish, are mingled together in strange fashion. Of the author nothing definite can be said, but we may assume him to have been a learned clergyman who occupied himself with the instruction of the youth. His work at least seems to show this, for it was manifestly not compiled for the purpose of preserving the proverbs, but rather of serving as a text-book in learning the Latin. The Latin verses are the chief thing, and the proverbs are simply introduced in elucidation of the former. Apparently the original compilation of the work was made in the fifteenth century, but it has doubtless received various later additions. It is of course of great interest, not only linguistically, but also to the history of civilization, being as it is the oldest collection of the kind in the Danish language, and because it contains many pithy proverbs which belong to a much earlier date. But its value as a school-book cannot be rated high, for the Latin of its leonine verses is far from being classical, and the whole character of the book, and particularly the many French words with which it teems, clearly betray the fact that France must have been the original home of the book. Still, it has been extensively used as a school text-book. In 1506 it was edited by "the scholars of the Copenhagen University," and two years later a fresh edition was called for. When Christiern Pedersen edited the book in Paris, in 1515, he complained of the barbaric Latin in which