Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/173

Rh and in which the author's faculty of giving his characters individual traits reaches its climax. Upon the whole this contemporary of Shakespeare was unquestionably a poetic and especially a dramatic talent, who under favorable circumstances would have accomplished important results, and even that which he did produce in the heavy style of the age may still be read with pleasure by all who possess sufficient culture to appreciate an utterly obsolete form of art. He was not a genius who was able to reject the traditional form and create a new one, but he managed to get more from the old materials than any one else had succeeded in producing from them before him, and in certain directions he even added something new. Of other old comedies still extant we shall here only mention the play "De Mundo et Paupere," because there occur in it certain passages that have some resemblance to passages in Holberg.