A prince of lovers

“It is indeed farewell, dear Princess? I am to go?”
Frontispiece.
A Prince of Lovers
A Romance
By SIR WILLIAM MAGNAY Bart Author of “The Red Chancellor,” “The Man-Trap,” “The Heiress of the Season,” Etc., Etc.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY CYRUS CUNEO
Boston Little, Brown and Company 1905
Copyright, 1905 , By Little, Brown, and Company.
All rights reserved Published March, 1905 Plates by The Husted Linotype Co., Cleveland, U. S. A. Presswork by The University Press, Cambridge, U. S. A.
A Prince of Lovers
FOR the greater part of two centuries after the close of the Thirty Years War there existed in Germany some two hundred independent states. It is with two of these, lying in the midst of what was once the Hercynian forest, which tract even then, although in slow process of clearing, retained much of its primitive, desolate wildness, that the events of the following story are concerned.
And it may be well to premise, seeing that nowadays in story-telling the realms of imagination have often a two-fold meaning, literal as well as metaphorical, that, though the embroidery of this tale may be fanciful, the ground upon which it is worked is of the substance called fact. For the once secret chronicles of these two hundred kingdoms, principalities, palatinates, bishoprics, duchies, landgravates and what not form very pretty reading to the student of humanity; and the dull atmosphere of much pettiness and fatuous pomp is lighted up in welcome fashion by occasional stars of romance. And, after all, apart from the favourable soil they find in that traditional land of the romantic, these flowers which continually spring up amid the dull herbage are easily accounted for. For what is romance but the opposite of the humdrum? And is not human nature the same all the world over, flourishing even when found in the stifling confinement of a formal and etiquette-bound court? And does not young and healthy humanity rebel against the humdrum, and fight tooth and nail against its own repression?