naco, in the crowned republic of Great Britain and
Ireland and in the eternal anachronism of the Ottoman Empire. And the
time-limit of five years had been exceeded by only three months.

In the peaceful period, four times longer, between the publication of
_Majesty_ in 1894 and the outbreak of the Great War, historians were
kept hardly less busy with their record of fallen monarchs and
extinguished dynasties: King Humbert of Italy was assassinated in 1900;
King Alexander of Servia, with his queen, in 1903; King Carlos of
Portugal, with the heir-apparent, in 1908; and the Sultan Abdul Hamid
was deposed and imprisoned in 1909. Before the year 1894 no ruler of
note had removed himself or been removed since the assassination of the
Czar Alexander II in 1881; this study of "majesty" in its strength and,
still more, in its weakness was published at a time when even the
autocrat was more secure on his throne than at any period since "the
year of revolution," 1848.

If _Majesty_ is to be regarded as a _roman a clef_, there is a
temptation, after six and twenty years, to call Couperus 'prophetic:' to
call him that and nothing else is to turn blind eyes to the intuitive
understanding which is more precious than divination, to ignore, in one
book, the insight which illumines all and to overlook the quality which,
among all the chronicles of kings, penetrates beyond romance and makes
of _Majesty_ an essay in human psychology. So long as the fairy-tales of
childhood are woven about handsome princes and the fair-haired daughters
of kings, there is no danger that the setting of royalty will ever lose
its glamour; so long as "romantic" means primarily that which is
"strange," the writer of romance may bind his spell on all to whom
kings' houses and queens' gardens are an unfamiliar world; so long as
the picturesque and traditional hold sway, the sanction and titles of
kingship, the dignities and the procedure, the inhibitions and aloofness
of royalty will fascinate, whether they like it or not, all those in
whose veins there is no "golden drop" of blood royal. A romance of
kingship, alike in the hands of dramatist, melodramatist and sycophant,
is certain of commercial success.

The strength of this temptation is to be measured by the number of
novels written round the triumphs and intrigues of kings, their amours
and tragedies, their conflicts and disasters: King Cophetua and "King
Sun," Prince Hal and Richard the Second, Louis the E