The later poet reverses the attitude of the sexes in Love's Labour's
Lost: it is the women who make and break the vow; and the women in
The Princess insist on the "grand, epic, homicidal" scenes, while the
men are debarred, more or less, from a sportive treatment of the
subject. The tavern catch of Cyril; the laughable pursuit of the
Prince by the feminine Proctors; the draggled appearance of the
adventurers in female garb, are concessions to the humour of the
situation. Shakespeare would certainly have given us the song of
Cyril at the picnic, and comic enough the effect would have been on
the stage. It may be a gross employment, but The Princess, with the
pretty chorus of girl undergraduates,


"In colours gayer than the morning mist,"


went reasonably well in opera. Merely considered as a romantic
fiction, The Princess presents higher proofs of original narrative
genius than any other such attempt by its author.

The poem is far from being deficient in that human interest which
Shelley said that it was as vain to ask from HIM, as to seek to buy a
leg of mutton at a gin-shop. The characters, the protagonists, with
Cyril, Melissa, Lady Blanche, the child Aglaia, King Gama, the other
king, Arac, and the hero's mother--beautifully studied from the
mother of the poet--are all sufficiently human. But they seem to
waver in the magic air, "as all the golden autumn woodland reels
athwart the fires of autumn leaves. For these reasons, and because
of the designed fantasy of the whole composition, The Princess is
essentially a poem for the true lovers of poetry, of Spenser and of