the Princess Royal produced
her note-book and read aloud extracts which gave an impressionist
bird's-eye view of English Literature from the fourteenth to the close
of the nineteenth Century.

No doubt the lecturer had given his audience credit for some previous
acquaintance with the subject, and it may be that Princess Edna's method
of note-taking had been a trifle desultory; it was certain that the
ladies-in-waiting found a difficulty in assimilating the scraps of
literary pemmican she dispensed to them.

They received with polite but languid attention such items as that:
"Shakespeare stands supreme among dramatists for consummate knowledge of
the human heart"; that: "as _Ralph Roister Doister_ is the first pure
comedy, so _The Vicar of Wakefield_ may be termed the first idyllic
English novel"; that: "while Byron possessed more intellect than
imagination, Shelley, on the contrary, was rather imaginative than
intellectual"; and even the statement that: "Browning's 'Ring and the
Book' contains upwards of twenty-one thousand lines" left them unmoved.

It is true they were more interested in hearing that it was: "after he
had come under the spell of Petrarch and Boccaccio that Chaucer produced
his wondrous Tales," but it appeared their interest was due to some
slight misapprehension. Daphne felt the fearful joy of suppressed mirth
combined with the danger of detection as she heard Edna explaining with
laborious patience that she had _not_ intended to convey that the Poet
had been afflicted by a pair of enchanters with any caudal appendages
whatever.

But the Princess Royal could not conceal her disgust when her final
extract, which was to the effect that: "during the closing decade of the
Nineteenth Century England became once more a 'nest of singing birds,'
as was apparent from the stream of fresh and melodious strains issuing
from, among other sources, 'The Bodley Head,'" was greeted with a ripple
of girlish laughter from her hearers. It seemed that this
incontrovertible statement of fact had somehow aroused reminiscences of
another head which, if fresh, had not been precisely melodious on the
luncheon board after the Coronation.

Princess Edna waited with cold dignity until the last giggle was no
longer audible before announcing that she was willing to answer any
questions they might wish to ask her. Upon which Baroness Kluge von
Bauerngrosstochterheimer begged that they might be favoured with the
outline of one