small amount of his best work.

Keats, too, if his

marvelous promise may be taken as earnest of what he would have done in the years of performance that were denied him. Such hard-and-fast comparisons, however, are of little use except as checks upon unreasoning enthusiasm. What must not be forgotten is that no English poet save Tennyson was so long and so unfailingly an artist. Still more memorable is the fact that, through the last fifty of his sixty years of writing, he reflected the best thought of the age, and at the same time bettered the ideals of multitudes of English-speaking men and women.

THE PRINCESS

In the case of a work so celebrated and so much discussed as The Princess, persons who look at literature from the point of view of students will like to enquire what relation Tennyson's poem may have to the past, and how the same subject. may have been treated by earlier writers. Naturally, the aspirations of women in the state were considered in Plato's Republic, and as naturally they were rather lightly considered. In English, Ascham and Milton touched upon the matter; but probably the first college for women proposed in detail was The Female Academy of Margaret Cavendish. Defoe proposed, with apparent sincerity, to found a college for women where they might study branches of learning "suitable to both

their genius and their quality." "I need not enlarge," writes Defoe, in his Essay on Projects, "on the loss the defect of education is to women, nor argue the benefit of the contrary practice; it is a thing will be more easily granted than remedied. This chapter is not an essay at the thing, and I refer the practice to those happy days, if ever they shall be, when men shall be wise enough to mend it." Whatever Defoe's real feeling-and it is always safe to prefix the adjective apparent whenever we use the noun sincerity, of the great Trimmer of literature-Addison and Steele were well known as advocates of a better education for women, and Mary Wollstonecraft was its ardent partisan.

All these discussions, however, could have been but vague echoes in the ears of a poet of our own day. Two works only are likely to have furnished him anything,-Shakspere's Love's Labours Lost and Johnson's Rasselas. Johnson's Princess "desired first to learn all sciences, and then proposed to found a college of learned women in which she would preside, that, by conversing with the old and educating the young, she might divide her time between the acquisition and communication of wisdom, and raise up for the next age models of prudence and patterns of piety." But the Johnsonian heaven and the Johnsonian earth are not the Tennysonian. The Princess in Rasselas, though closely related to Miss Pinkerton

of Chiswick and Miss Jenkyns of Cranford, is scarce cater-cousin to the Princess Ida.

At first sight, perhaps, Tennyson would seem to have been considerably indebted to Love's Labours Lost. The scheme of the poem and that of the play are alike by contraries. Shakspere paints the retirement from the world, for study and meditation, of a king and three lords. Their sequestered course is to be for three years, during which they bind themselves not to look upon a woman. Then come a princess and her three ladies, who play parts similar to those of the invading men in The Princess. It is the opinion of Mr. Morton Luce, -who raises the question in his Handbook to Tennyson's Works-that the passage quoted from Rasselas (he adds also Johnson's statement: “The Princess thought that of all sublunary things knowledge was the best"), taken "together with Love's Labours Lost, supplies more than the foundation of Tennyson's famous College." Gama, the father of Ida, says, indeed,-"Knowledge, so my daughter held, was all in all." But Gama need not have looked to Dr. Johnson or to any other one person for his saying.

As to Love's Labours Lost, the ground-plan of The Princess and no more, I am disposed to admit as Tennyson's debt to Shakspere. In Shakspere the elements are differently mixed. Not only would the reversal of the parts have shut out any consideration of the education or the "rights" of women,

but Shakspere's purpose was so far from discussing the education or rights of either sex, as evidently to have been a brilliant young intention of satirizing Lilly and the other euphuists. The doggerel, the introduction of sonnets as speeches, the extravagant alliteration, the crackling fire of quibble, quip, antithesis, and epigram-all these, with the odd grammatical forms and the antiphonal speeches of the characters in rhyming verse, are none the less parts of this satirical design because they are also, in less glaring degree, marks of Shakspere's own early style. In another way, quite as important, the nineteenth-century poem differs from the sixteenth-century play. The comic spirit breathes very lightly upon the King of Navarre, the Princess of France, and their attendants. Shakspere reserved his farce for Armado and the rest,-"the pedant, the braggart, the hedge priest, the fool, and the boy." The noble persons move with enchanting grace through a love story that is more than half a pageant or a masque. Tennyson, to be sure, retains Cupid, and conducts his arguments in the court of love. He, too, gives himself the aid of pageantry. Yet in the humorous treatment which is an essential part of the Medley he often burlesques-more often, one fancies, than he is always aware--both his argument and his love scenes. Even the masque, when the chorus of men is opposed to the chorus of Amazons, comes perilously near opéra bouffe.

Tennyson's debt to Rasselas, then, is slight. His real, though not burdensome obligation to Love's Labours Lost, it has become too much a matter of course to take too seriously.

The simple plot of The Princess is as follows: A Prince of the North, after being affianced as a child to a Princess of the South, has fallen in love with her portrait and a lock of her hair. When, however, the embassy appears to fetch home the bride, she sends back the message that she is not disposed to be married. Upon receipt of this word the Prince and two friends, Florian and Cyril, steal away to seek the Princess, and learn on reaching her father's court that she has established a Woman's College on a distant .estate. Having got letters authorizing them to visit the Princess, they ride into her domain, where they determine to go. dressed like girls and apply for admission as students in the College. They arrive in disguise, and are admitted. On the first day the young men enroll themselves as students of Lady Psyche, who recognizes Florian as her brother and agrees not to expose them, since-by a law of the College inscribed above the gates, which darkness has kept them from seeing-the penalty of their discovery would be death. Melissa, a student, overhears them, and is bound over to keep the secret. Lady Blanche, mother of Melissa and rival to Lady Psyche, also learns of the alarming invasion, and remains silent for sinister reasons of her own. On