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suggests. To bring these jarring elements together, the author adopts the not new device of making one set of characters tell the story of another set. The Prologue and Epilogue show us an English scene. Sir Walter Vivian is giving a festival to his tenants in the baronial grounds of Vivian Place. The family, the ladies, young Walter and some College friends, meet for luncheon on the lawn. Here beside "a Gothic ruin and a Grecian house" amidst "a talk of college and of ladies' right," they tell a story to pass away the time. One dreamy young collegian, who has been all morning poring over the book of the chronicle of the house of Vivian, wherein he reads how, of old, a lady-warrior defended and saved her castle from a wicked king, begins. The story follows of a Princess who, betrothed in childhood to a neighboring Prince, when she is grown will none of him, but runs away to build "an University for maidens." The Prince, with two companions, comes to seek her; they don feminine apparel and enroll among her pupils. Soon they are discovered and wrathfully ejected; in draggled feminine garments the Prince seeks the tents of his father, the two kings having meanwhile encamped in battle array close by. A fight ensues in which the Prince is defeated and wounded; the University becomes a hospital for wounded soldiers and the Princess Ida and her pupils a corps of nurses.
"Love in the sacred halls
Held carnival at will and flying struck
With showers of random sweet on maid and man.
The Princess, "grand, epic, homicidal," grows to be human and woman; the climax of interest and poetic fervor is reached and we are brought back for our adieu to the glimmering twilight of an English garden.
The characters are drawn with bold outlines and delicate shadings and with somewhat of realism. The Southern King Gama so blandly polite, "airing a snowy hand and signet ring" says to the Princess who comes seeking his betrothed:—
He complacently bemoans his daughter'ssw aywardness; amuses his guests with an account of the
"awful odes she wrote,— Too awful, sure for what they treated of, But all she is and does is awful"
"You do us, Prince,
All honor. We remember love ourselves
In our sweet youth: there did a compact pass
Long summers back .a kind of ceremony—
I think the year in which our olives failed."
and courteously offers him letters of introduction to his runaway bride. In contract, and not less clearly drawn, is the Northern King, the Prince's father, who blusters
"we ourself
Will crush her pretty maiden fancies dead In iron gauntlets;"
and thus derides his love-lorn son:—
"Boy, when I hear you prate, I almost think That idiot legend credible. Look you, sir! Man is the hunter; woman is his game: The sleek and shining creatures of the chase. We hunt them for the beauty of their skins; They love us for it, and we ride them down. Wheedling and silling with them! out for her
Wheedling and siding with them! out! for shamel"
Cyril is a good characrer and well conceived; not very noble, perhaps, but a practical and likeable fellow; the sort of a fellow who sees life as it is and yet likes it pretty well. He is in fine contrast to the Prince, and his good sense and good humor bring the reader a grateful feeling of relief. He sees clearly how absurd is Lady Psyche with her baby clinging to her skirts while she lectures on evolution,yet is falling in love with her all the time. Florian is not a strong character-study and has apparently no especial value in the development of the story.
Lady Psyche is a pretty type of the young mother, "with three castles and plenty of leisure." Like many of our own time, she may be almost unbalanced in her devotion to the nebular hypothesis, ceramics, Ibsen's, plays, or another fad; but she finds surely enough, when it comes to the test, that her baby comes first. Lady Blanche,
"of faded form and haughtiest lineaments And all her tresses falsely brown"
with "wintry eye," a "vulture throat" and "haggard smile," is everything that is unlovely in woman. I am sorry, for the sake of realism and artistic effect, that Tennyson did not make Lady Blanche a soured old maid; it is evident that her heart was stranger to the love of which the poet sings; but we should thereby have missed the cap-stone of that lady's repulseiveness,