_King_. Our Court shall be a little Academe, Still and contemplative in living art. You three, Biron, Domain, and Longaville, Have sworn for three years’ term to live with me, My fellow-scholars, and to keep those statutes. * * * * * _Biron_. That is, to live and study here three years. But there are other strict observances; As, not to see a woman in that term. * * * * * [_Reads_] ‘That no woman shalt come within a mile of my Court:’ Hath this been proclaimed? _Long_. Four days ago. _Biron_. Let’s see the penalty. [_Reads_] ‘On pain of losing her tongue.’ The Princess then arrives with her ladies, as the Prince does with Cyril and Florian, as Charles did, with Buckingham, in Spain. The conclusion of Shakespeare is Tennyson’s conclusion— “We cannot cross the cause why we are born.” 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.