The idea of a "democratic monarchy"--a kind of reformed constitutional monarchy, that should be a half-way house on the road to republicanism--was not entirely new; Bjornson's success was in presenting the problem as seen from the _inside_--that is to say, from the king's point of view. His opponents, of course, branded him as a red-hot republican, which he was not. In a preface he wrote for a later edition of the play, he says that he did not intend the play mainly as an argument in favour of republicanism, but "to extend the boundaries of free discussion"; but that, at the same time, he believed the republic to be the ultimate form of government, and all European states to be proceeding at varying rates of speed towards it. _The King_ is composed of curiously incongruous elements. The railway meeting in the first act is pure comedy of a kind to compare with the meeting in Ibsen's _An Enemy of Society_; the last act is melodrama with a large admixture of remarkably interesting social philosophy; the intervening acts betray the poet that always underlay the dramatist in Bjornson. The crudity, again, of the melodramatic appearance of the wraith of Clara's father in the third act, contrasts strangely with the mature thoughtfulness of much of the last act and with the tender charm of what has gone before: And--strangest incongruity of all in a play so essentially "actual"--there is in the original, between each act, a mysterious "mellemspil," or "interlude," in verse, consisting of somewhat cryptic dialogues between Genii and Unseen Choirs in the clouds, between an "Old Grey Man" and a "Chorus of Tyrants" in a desolate scene of snow and ice, between Choruses of Men, Women, and Children in a sylvan landscape, and so forth--their utterances being of the nature of the obscurest choruses in the Greek dramatists, but for the most part with a less obvious relevance to the play itself. Such a device leads the present-day reader's thoughts inevitably to the use made of the "unseen chorus," in a similar way, by Thomas Hardy in _The Dynasts_; but Hardy's interludes are closely relevant to his drama and help it on its way, which Bjornson's do not. They have been entirely omitted in the present translation, on the ground of their complete superfluity as well as from the extreme difficulty of retaining their "atmosphere" in translation. None of the three plays in the present volume have previously been translated into English. German, French, and Swedish versions of _The Editor_ are extant; German, Swedish, Finnish, French, and Hungarian of _The Bankrupt_; French and Spanish of _The King_. R. FARQUHARSON SHARP. The following is a list of the works of Bjornstjerne Bjornson:--