Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Volume 5).djvu/361

] your impudent address was tending. "Man, let nothing surprise you," I was tempted to say with the comic poet, when I heard you, like an ill-conditioned cur, barking forth, not expressions of gratitude, but a string of irrational nursery-tales, and ill-written to boot. For your verses were bad, Heraclius;—that I have proved in my treatise.

How I longed to arise and leave the hall when I saw you, as in a theatre, making a spectacle both of Dionysus and of the great immortal after whom you are named! If I constrained myself to keep my seat, I can assure you 'twas more out of respect to the players—if I dare call them so—than to the poet. But 'twas most of all for my own sake. I feared it might seem as though I were fleeing like a frightened dove. Therefore I made no sign, but quietly repeated to myself that verse of Homer:

"Bear it, my heart, for a time; heavier things hast thou suffered."

Endure, as before, to hear a mad dog yelp at the eternal gods.

Yes, I see we must stomach this and more, We are fallen on evil days. Show me the happy man who has been suffered to keep his eyes and ears uncontaminated in this iron age!

I pray you, my noble master, be not so deeply moved. Let it comfort you that we all listened with displeasure to this man's folly.

That is in nowise the truth! I read in the countenances of most of you something far different from displeasure while this shameless