Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/150

132 it was written, and in the school ordinance of Christian II it is enumerated among the books to be burned. No one took notice of the proverbs which it contained, and a whole century elapsed before Peder Laale was again rescued from oblivion, and it was then done in honor of the old pithy proverbs, which the book contained.

The Danish literature of the middle age offers no pleasing picture for our consideration. At the very outset the national element was excluded, and was tolerated only in the popular ballads, while the entire literature proper was not only written in Latin, but also, in respect to contents, entered a field where the people were unable to follow, and the result was that it became exclusively the property of the learned class. This was, however, the condition of things not only in Denmark, but also in all the rest of Europe. But while strenuous efforts were made in other lands to throw off the Latin yoke in order to give more room to the national and popular element, such efforts were almost wholly wanting in Denmark, and when the vernacular at length began to claim some of the place that belonged to it, the reason for this was not that any strong national impulse stirred the people, but chiefly that the representatives of the foreign culture were no longer equal to the performance of their task. The Danish clergy won no laurels as guardians of the spiritual culture of the middle age. Only in the first centuries after the introduction and establishment of Christianity was the conduct of the clergy such as to exempt them from this blame, and during the most flourishing period of Denmark their relation to European culture in general is deserving of great praise, but it was not long before genuine culture (so far as there was any real culture in those days) degenerated into the semblance of culture, and even the latter gradually disappeared. The convents had at first been the seats of diligent and successful intellectual activity, though they produced no very marked results; but they gradually became