Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/152

134 institution was based. Its curriculum was made out according to the old scholastic system, and could not therefore have any attraction for the Danish youths, who continued to resort to German universities, so that King Johan found it necessary to publish an ordinance forbidding anybody to visit a foreign university before he had attended the University of Copenhagen at least three years. The latter institution did not therefore from the very outset have any great measure of success, and when the stirring times of the Reformation began, bringing in their wake disorder and uncertainty in all ecclesiastical matters, the university languished, and in the last years of the reign of Fredrik I it can hardly be said to have existed.

Many circumstances coöperated in smothering the incipient germs of an intellectual development which might have been of great importance to the whole people. The disturbances and misfortunes which Denmark had to endure during the last two centuries of the middle age were particularly detrimental to her prosperity. Among these are the parcelling out of the country among foreign conquerors, pestilence, the dissensions between the spiritual and civil powers, etc. The worst of all was perhaps the increasing influence of Germany on Danish affairs. The latter was an inevitable result of the whole historical situation, but that influence necessarily obstructed the development of an independent intellectual life and the creation of Danish literature on a national basis. The German language and German customs monopolized everything, and contributed much to the destruction of national sentiment and self-reliance among the people. The Hanseatic cities had by degrees monopolized the commerce of the whole North; German craftsmen had immigrated in vast numbers; the Danish kings were of German extraction; the whole culture of the country, so far as it was not already Latin, became Germanized, or, in other words, foreign influence prevailed everywhere. The national ascendancy which raised the country to an ephemeral