"High-arch'd and ivy-claspt,
Of finest Gothic, lighter than a fire."
This is a curious jumble in company, two lights of altogether a different nature; but the party get into a rattling conversation, in which the noisy babble of the College Cubs is satirically characterized: we
"Told
Of college: he had climb'd across the spikes,
And he had squeez'd himself betwixt the bars,
And he had breathed the Proctor's dogs; and one
Discuss'd his tutor, rough to common men
But honeying at the whisper of a lord;
And one the Master, as a rogue in grain
Veneer'd with sanctimonious theory."
The dialogue happily takes a turn, and the task of writing the Princess is assigned to the author, as one of the tales in the Decameron of Boccaccio. A neighbouring princess of the south (so the story runs as the prince tells it) is in childhood betrothed to a like childish prince of the north:—
"She to me
Was proxy-wedded with a bootless calf [?]
At eight years old."
Both grew up, the prince, all imaginative, filling his mind with pictures of her perfections; but she turning a female reformer of the Wolstencroft [sic] school, resolved never to wed till woman was raised to an equality with men, and establishing a strange female colony and college to carry this vast design into effect. In consequence of this her father is obliged to violate the contract, and his indignant father prepares for war to enforce it. The prince, with two companions, flies to the south, to try what he can do for himself; and in the disguise of ladies they obtain admission to the guarded precincts of the new Amazonian league. He, meanwhile, sings sweetly of his mistress—
"And still I wore her picture by my heart,
And one dark tress; and all around them both
Sweet thoughts would swarm as bees about their queen."
And of his friend—
"My other heart,
My shadow, my half-self, for still we moved
Together, kin as horse's ear and eye."
His evasion is also finely told—