The news of the stormy reception of his comedy reached Ibsen in Egypt, where, as the guest of the Khedive, he was attending the opening of the Suez Canal. He has recorded the incident in a poem, _At Port Said_. On his return to Dresden he wrote to Hegel (December 14, 1869): “The reception of _The League of Youth_ pleases me very much; for the disapprobation I was prepared, and it would have been a disappointment to me if there had been none. But what I was not prepared for was that Björnson should feel himself attacked by the play, as rumour says he does. Is this really the case? He must surely see that it is not himself I have had in mind, but his pernicious and ‘lie-steeped’ clique who have served me as models. However, I will write to him to-day or to-morrow, and I hope that the affair, in spite of all differences, will end in a reconciliation.” The intended letter does not appear to have been written; nor would it, probably, have produced the desired effect, for Björnson’s resentment was very deep. He had already (in November) written a poem to Johan Sverdrup, the leader of the Liberal party, in which he deplored the fact that “the sacred grove of poetry no longer afforded sanctuary against assassination,” or as the Norwegian word vigorously expresses it, “sneak-murder.” Long afterwards, in 1881, he explained what he meant by this term: “It was not the portrayal of contemporary life and known personages that I called assassination. It was the fact that _The League of Youth_ sought to represent our young Liberal party as a gang of ambitious speculators, whose patriotism was as empty as their phraseology; and particularly that prominent men were first made clearly recognisable, and then had false hearts and shady characters foisted upon them.” It is difficult to see, indeed, how Ibsen can have expected Björnson to distinguish very clearly between an attack on his “lie-steeped clique” and a lampoon on himself. Even Stensgård’s religious phraseology, the confidence with which he claims God as a member of his party, was at that time characteristic of Björnson. The case, in fact, seems to have been very like that of the portraiture of Leigh Hunt in Harold Skimpole. Both Dickens and Ibsen had unconsciously taken more from their respective models than they intended. They imagined, perhaps, that the features which did not belong to the original would conceal the likeness; whereas their actual effect was only to render the portraits libellous.