With all his desire to 'undermine the idea of the state,' he besieges king and government with petitions for money; and he will confess in a letter, 'I should very much like to write publicly about the mean behaviour of the government,' which, however, he refrains from doing. He gets sore and angry over party and parochial rights and wrongs, even when he is far away from them, and has congratulated himself on the calming and enlightening effect of distance. A Norwegian bookseller threatens to pirate one of his books, and he makes a national matter of it. 'If,' he says, 'this dishonest speculation really obtains sympathy and support at home, it is my intention, come what may, to sever all ties with Norway and never set foot on her soil again.' How petty, how like a hysterical woman that is! How, in its way of taking a possible trifling personal injustice as if it were a thing of vital and even national moment, he betrays what was always to remain narrow, as well as bitter, in the centre of his being! He has recorded it against himself (for he spared himself, as he proudly and truthfully said, no more than others) in an anecdote which is a profound symbol. During the time I was writing _Brand_, I had on my desk a glass with a scorpion in it. From time to time the little animal was ill. Then I used to give it a piece of soft fruit, upon which it fell furiously and emptied its poison into it--after which it was well again. Does not something of the kind happen with us poets? Poets, no; but in Ibsen there is always some likeness of the sick scorpion in the glass.