The fourth act contains a good many special allusions, in addition to the general, and somewhat crude, satire in the opening scene on the characteristics of different nationalities, with particular reference to their conduct in the Dano-German crisis. Peer’s dreams of African colonisation (Act IV. Sc. 5) are said to refer to certain projects which Ole Bull had about this time been ventilating. But it is especially in the madhouse scene (Act IV. Sc. 13) that satiric sallies abound. “The Fellah with the royal mummy on his back,” says Henrik Jæger,[19] “is—like Trumpeterstråle—a cut at the Swedes, the mummy being Charles the Twelfth. Like the Fellah, it is implied, the Swedes are extremely proud of their ‘Hero-king,’ and yet during the Dano-German war they showed not the smallest sign of having anything in common with him, unless it were that they, like him, ‘kept still and completely dead.’ In the delusion of the minister Hussein, who imagines himself a pen, there is a general reference to the futile address- and note-mongering which went on in Norwegian-Swedish officialdom during the Dano-German War, and a more special one to an eminent Swedish statesman [Grev Manderström], who, during the war, had been extremely proud of his official notes, and had imagined that by means of them he might exercise a decisive influence on the course of events.” Most prominent and unmistakable of all the satiric passages, however, is the attack on the language-reformers in the personage of Huhu. In the list of characters, Huhu is set down as a “Målstræver from Zanzibar.” Now the Målstrævers are a party which desires to substitute a language compounded from the various local dialects, for the Norwegian of the townsfolk and of literature. This they call Danish, and declare to be practically a foreign tongue to the peasants, who form the backbone of the Norwegian nation. Ibsen’s satire, it must be said, has had little or no effect on the movement, which has gone on slowly but steadily, and has of late years met with official and legislative recognition. There is a large and increasing literature in the “Mål”; it is taught in schools and it is spoken in the Storthing. Where the movement may end it is hard to say. It must seem to a foreigner, as it seemed to Ibsen, retrograde and obscurantist; but there is doubtless some genuine impulse behind it which the foreigner cannot appreciate.