expected a dowry with his bride, while Tycho refused this, adding that if he would not take the girl for her own sake, he should not have her at all. In the autumn of 1594 the end of all this disagreement was that Gellius broke off the match. Still he seems about that time to have been frequently at Hveen, and Tycho wrote to his sister that all might yet be well if Gellius did not become vacillating again. But during an interview between Gellius and Tycho they quarrelled again about the matter, in consequence of which Tycho sent two friends to Gellius to demand a clear answer to the question whether he would accept the proposed terms or not. At first Gellius would not give a decisive answer, but during the next few days (in December 1594) he told one of the intercessors, Professor Krag, more than once, that he did not want Tycho's daughter; and on learning this, Tycho and his daughter sent Gellius a formal notice that the engagement was at an end.[1] In a letter to a friend (which was afterwards produced), Magdalene Brahe expressed herself thankful that all was over.
Gellius was greatly blamed by many people, but he tried to shift the blame on others, particularly on Krag, saying that he himself was joking or drunk when he spoke to the latter, and that his words were not intended to be carried further. Tycho, therefore, in the beginning of January 1595, got Krag to give him a written account of all that had happened between him and Gellius, as he particularly wished his sister Sophia to have an unbiassed explanation.
- ↑ Krag was perhaps hardly a safe person to employ in a delicate mission. He had recently been appointed royal historiographer, and had the following year the meanness to accept all the materials laboriously gathered by Tycho's friend Vedel, whom the Government forced to deliver up all his collections, because he had delayed the writing of his Danish history so long. Krag told Tycho in a pointed manner that he was glad that it had only fallen to his lot to describe the youth of Hveen and not its decay, by which he meant that his history was to stop at the death of King Frederick II. Wegener's Vedel, p. 200.
