Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 095.djvu/262

Rh All those requisite ingredients in the composition of an artist—and by "artists" Oehlenschlæger did not mean painters alone—are happily united in Ingemann. In his historical romances, which are decidedly his best works, "those shades from vanished days," those phantoms whom he has summoned, play their parts with spirit and life-like truth; he has, indeed, "re-animated departed generations," and the principal events and personages of his tales are strictly historical—not merely fictitious characters, and fancied scenes with borrowed names, forming a sort of masquerade. Though foreign readers cannot take so much interest in his historical heroes and heroines as Danes do, yet all must admit that the incidents, the descriptions, the delineation of passions and feelings, are most effective, and that one is carried back with the author’s ideas to the period of which they tell.

Ingemann's principal historical romances are, "Waldemar Seier," "Waldemar the Victorious;" "Erik Menveds Barndom," "The Childhood of Erik Menved;" "Kong Erik og de Fredlöse," "King Erik and the Outlaws;" and "Prince Otto of Denmark and his Contemporaries." To these may be added two historical poems—"Waldemar the Great and his Men," and "Queen Margrethe." Of these, "Waldemar the Victorious" and "King Erik and the Outlaws" may be enjoyed by the English reader through the medium of Miss Chapman’s admirable translations. In perusing her version of these charming works, one forgets that one is reading a translation, so thoroughly docs she enter into the spirit of the original. Her translations of some of Oehlenschlæger’s best dramas have before been mentioned. Miss Chapman would, doubtless, kindly permit some extracts to be given here from either of her two works; but as we have determined to borrow nothing, we shall take part of a scene or two from "The Childhood of Erik Menved." This romance, in three volumes, dwells much more on the deeds, or rather misdeeds, of King Erik Christopherson, the father of Erik Menved, than on any notice of that prince's childhood.

Erik Christopherson, or Glipping (a nickname bestowed on him in consequence of his having a habit of winking his eyelids continually), was one of the worst kings that ever reigned in Denmark. Vicious in his private character, treacherous, cruel, and timid, he was hated and despised; and though some few of the nobility adhered faithfully to him from loyalty to the crown, a conspiracy was formed against him by several others, at the head of which was Marshal Stig Andersen, whose beautiful wife the ungrateful king had grievously injured and insulted, when the brave Marshal Stig was leading the Danish troops against the enemies of his profligate sovereign. The conspirators assumed the disguise of monks—the grey brothers—and one of their number was the king's confidential and favourite attendant, and, as the deluded monarch fancied, personal friend, Kammersvend Ranè. It was he who, according to Ingemann’s tale, basely lured his royal master to a lonely building, where he was murdered by the conspirators, who then set fire to the barn where the deed was perpetrated; the blind, deranged father of Stig Andersen's wife perishing by chance in the flames. The real hero and heroine of the romance are Drost Peder Hessel, a chivalrous, superior character; and the Lady Inge, the clever, amiable, loyal and high-minded daughter of a Danish nobleman, who himself was weak and wavering in his