Perhaps it was bred in his bones, perhaps it was his mere desire for human knowledge that gave Couperus his penetration into the emotions which they of the blood were taught to conceal. In none of his books has he lavished more sympathy than in his painting of Prince Othomar's vacillation and passionate good-will, his timidity and desperate courage; nowhere has he used greater tenderness than in his sketch of the chivalry and gratitude which did duty for love in the passionless union of Valérie and the crown-prince. STEPHEN MCKENNA. LINCOLN'S INN, LONDON, 7 _October_, 1920. TRANSLATOR'S NOTE My first translation of _Majesty_ was written in collaboration with my dear friend Ernest Dowson and published in the year 1895. A small edition was sold by the London publisher to Messrs. D. Appleton & Company and has long been out of print. Messrs. Appleton, with characteristic generosity, have relinquished to the present publishers any copyright which they had established in the book and have thus enabled me to produce this new version. For even a translator's style undergoes notable modifications in a quarter of a century; and I should not have been satisfied to see this novel reissued in its earlier English form. The story should not therefore be regarded as a mere reprint. Incidentally, when collating the old Teixeira-Dowson version with the original, I was struck with the chaste and discreet appearance of the Dutch as compared with the English edition, soiled as the latter was on every page with a splash of capital letters. Is it some innate snobbery or merely lack of intelligence or thought that induces English writers--and for long myself among them--to dab a capital at the head of such nouns as the "emperor," the "crown-prince," the "duke," the "chancellor," "empire" and "state," nay, even the "major," the "professor," the "doctor," or of such adjectives as "royal" and "imperial"? If we are to write of the "Major" and the "Professor," why not be still more lavish with our capitals and write of the "Midshipman," the "Postmistress" and the "Postman"? Anyhow, I felt that a suitable time had come to experiment with an innovation and I decided to reduce my capital letters to a minimum and to affix them to titles only when these were followed by the name. Even the Germans do not distinguish their titles with capitals; they have the more logical habit of beginning every substantive with a capital; and, in their murky language, this habit has one advantage, that it assists the reader to hunt the elusive verbs to their lair. The English have not this reason nor this excuse. My thanks are due not only to Messrs. Appleton but also to Mr. Stephen McKenna, the most acceptable of our younger novelists, who in his admiration for the elder craftsman, has volunteered to write a preface to Louis Couperus' present masterpiece. ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS.