&
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.

VENTNOR, I.W., 1 _November_, 1920.

MAJESTY

CHAPTER I

1

Lipara, usually a city white as marble: long, white rows of villas on a
southern blue sea; endless, elegant esplanades on the front, with palms
whose green lacquer shimmered against an atmosphere of vivid blue ether.
But to-day there drifted a