d you by vainglory but
rather by plain equity, and simply in acknowledgment of the fact that
he who seeks to write of noble ladies must necessarily implore at
outset the patronage of her who is the light and mainstay of our age.
In fine, I humbly bring my book to you as Phidyle approached another
and less sacred shrine, _farre pio et salente mica_, and lay before you
this my valueless mean tribute not as appropriate to you but as the
best I have to offer.

It is a little book wherein I treat of divers queens and of their
love-business; and with necessitated candor I concede my chosen field
to have been harvested, and even scrupulously gleaned, by many writers
of innumerable conditions. Since Dares Phrygius wrote of Queen Heleine
and Virgil (that shrewd necromancer) of Queen Dido, a preponderating
mass of clerks, in casting about for high and serious matter, have
chosen, as though it were by common instinct, to dilate upon the amours
of royal women. Even in romance we scribblers must contrive it so that
the fair Nicolette shall be discovered in the end to be no less than
the King's daughter of Carthage, and that Sir Doon of Mayence shall
never sink in his love-affairs beneath the degree of a Saracen
princess; and we are backed in this old procedure not only by the
authority of Aristotle but, oddly enough, by that of reason as well.

Kings have their policies and wars wherewith to drug each appetite.
But their consorts are denied these makeshifts; and love may rationally
be defined as the pivot of each normal woman's life, and in consequence
as the arbiter of that ensuing life which is eternal. Because--as of
old Horatius Flaccus demanded, though not, to speak the truth, of any
woman,--

_Quo fugis? ah demons! nulla est fuga, tu licet usque_
_Ad Tanaim fugias, usque sequetur amor._

And a dairymaid, let us say, may love whom she will, and nobody else be
a penny the worse for her mistaking of the preferable nail whereon to
hang her affections; whereas with a queen this choice is more
portentous. She plays the game of life upon a loftier table,
ruthlessly illuminated, and stakes by her least movement a tall pile of
counters, some of which are, of necessity, the lives and happiness of
persons whom she knows not, unless it be by vague report. Grandeur
sells itself at this hard price, and at no other. A queen must always
play, in fine, as the vicar of destiny, free to choose but very
certainly compelled to jus