The more you try to sound the marvellous authorship of Holberg the more you feel convinced of the importance of his stay at Oxford. It would require several lectures to trace the way in which his impressions and his experiences of Oxford have moulded him as an historian, as a playwright, as a philosopher and moralist. I can only tell you that he took with him from this place to Copenhagen and to the Dano-Norwegian community not only the conviction of his future mission, but practically the very seeds of what should ripen into one of the richest crops in the field of literature. If Macaulay had known Holberg he would have had to give a somewhat different turn to his famous sentence: "France has been the intermediary between England and Mankind." Holberg visited England twenty-five years before Voltaire and twenty-four years before Montesquieu, and brought back first hand views and impressions, sifted only through the medium of his unbiassed mind. To put it briefly, Holberg has been the intermediary between England and the North. At Oxford Holberg planned the work by which he started in literature in 1711: _Introduction to the History of the European Kingdoms_,[2] containing a remarkable chapter on England and the English from the time of the Romans down to 1702, with quotations from various authors, among them Milton, William Camden, and Lord Clarendon. This work, against which many objections have been raised and, to a certain extent, not unjustly, nevertheless is stamped by the characteristic features of his genius, so familiar to all Holberg students--his original way of thinking, his contempt for all sorts of ostentatious learning blocking the way by irrelevant facts, his plain language--vigorous, manly, with a turn of its own--his sound judgment, and perhaps, above all, the generally fair way in which he arraigns his persons before the tribunal of history. Summing up his impressions and reminiscences twenty years later, Holberg says in his autobiography: "_I confess that I have many reasons for considering myself under great obligations to the Oxonians._" This is no phrase of politeness. It is the opinion of a man whose correct and blameless demeanour, no less than his sincerity, his loyalty, and his intellectual abilities, had won him the appreciation of his professors and the friendship of his fellow-students. His English was excellent, and he does not conceal the fact that he is a bit proud of it. Indeed, it is somewhat of a sacrifice not to indulge in quotations from Holberg's autobiography--particularly so at the point at which we find ourselves now--for his description of his stay at Oxford is highly attractive, not only from a literary but a human point of view. Altogether his autobiography is a curiously fascinating work, of which no one will repent making the acquaintance. It ought to reappear in a modern English translation. III.