Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/175

by Christian III, acquired a decided influence on the entire course of events. Just as the Danish university had originally been founded after a German pattern, so its reorganization and reconstruction into a Protestant university were like the new disposition of the affairs of the church, with which it became intimately connected, carried out wholly in a German spirit. The real model of the Copenhagen University was the Wittenberg institution, for Luther's friend, Bugenhagen, who had been summoned to Denmark by Christian III for the purpose of superintending the reconstruction of the church and the university, had been a professor in Wittenberg. It was now thought to be of the greatest importance to protect the doctrine against corruption of every kind, and accordingly the professors of theology were armed with the power of exercising censure, and this power, which was originally supposed to apply only to religious works, was gradually extended, and made to embrace other departments of literature, and thus necessarily became a great obstacle to the literary development of the country. The Latin soon gained the upper hand both in the university and in the other schools, and even the men who had the preservation of Danish at heart were unable to free themselves from the tyranny of the Latinists. It must be admitted that learning was now pursued with an ardor and success never before attained, but a spiritless pedantry soon became associated with it, and literature developed in a direction which could not but prove fatal to that cultivation of the national tongue which had been inaugurated under so favorable auspices in the time of the Reformation by the publication of works for the people. Just as the priests in the middle age had been the sole representatives of intellectual action, so the learned class now also gradually isolated themselves from the rest of the people and buried themselves in studies, which too frequently were empty and barren and utterly without any bearing on life and reality. The whole period is therefore, in spite of the array of splendid names of which it can boast, essen-