In an outline like the present, of the progress of poetry, it is needless to dwell upon the subject of the anti-homeric poets of Greece. That there were poets before Homer, we know; and this is really the extent of what is known on the subject. That the art of poetry had been cultivated to a considerable extent, that its principles had been subjected to reflection and experiment, when Homer lived, is as clear as internal evidence in any case can make it.

Poetry improves only as painting and sculpture rise to perfection. "In sculpture," says Herder, "what a track must it have travelled over in passing from the figures on the chest of Cypselus to the decorations of the Propyleia and the Minerva of Phidias, or from the sculptures of Dædalus to the Olympic Jupiter. A like track was travelled by poetry in advancing from the rude lays in honour of gods and chiefs to the Homeric Epos." We know, indeed, that many of the minstrels before Homer had sung theogonies and cosmogonies, the adventures of Titans and heroes, of Hercules, Theseus, and the Argonauts; and in all probability the legends of the siege of Troy, and the return of the chiefs engaged in that enterprise, had formed the subject of many a ballad or rhapsody, ere a Homer arose to give them unity, proportion, and poetic life. All these have faded and been forgotten, for the tablet of human memory is narrow, and, to give room for the last and best, the older and ruder inscriptions must be erazed. Not one of these, accordingly, has descended to us in any authentic form; whilst the spuriousness of most of the Orphic poetry is unquestionable. Whether even an Orpheus ever existed, was doubted by Aristotle; and Herodotus distinctly states his belief, that the poets given out as older than Homer were in fact of more recent date.

We do not enter into the details of the question whether the works which bear the name of Homer were the productions of one man, and written in their present form at the period commonly ascribed to them, namely, nine hundred years before Christ, or whether they were originally the work of many rhapsodists, in portions separate and distinct, and afterwards woven together in a collected form about the time of Solon and Pisistratus. The question is, in fact, of less importance in reference to the history of poetry than might at first sight appear. For whatever view may be adopted, it is clear that the spirit, the tone, and the manners which are described in the separate lays, supposed to have been ultimately incorporated in one, are those of the earlier and not of the later period, and that the Iliad paints the Grecian mind and character as it appeared three or four hundred years before the time of Solon, and that from draughts made at the time. If so, the only way in which the adoption of the modern theory of Wolff affects the question is, that it deprives Homer of the merit of one grand general design, consistently followed out. It is certain, however, that whatever difficulties may attend the supposition of the Iliad and Odyssey being written by one man, in their present form, and at the early date ascribed to them, and preserved in the absence of writing by mere oral tradition, the difficulties on the other side are infinitely greater. To suppose that a set of scattered lays, composed by a number of unconnected minstrels, should ever have been made to cohere so smoothly and compactly, evincing such perfect unity of plot and purpose; that they should have been confined to so small a portion of the Trojan legendary history, and have given such prominence to a single Thessalian hero; seems a supposition far more startling than any that attends the belief

"For inspi

that the Iliad is the work of a single author. ration is a solitary creative spirit; and it is not to knots and groups, or accidental fabricators, that she has ever intrusted those great conceptions in poetry or painting, or the fine arts, that have commanded the permanent homage of mankind." Many smaller additions, by other hands, in the same spirit and style, may have been afterwards superinduced upon the original work of Homer. (See the article HoMER, in the Encyclopædia Britannica.)

The two great poems of Homer are the first specimens of The Epic, or narrative poem. It is, in fact, from the Iliad in particular that our conceptions of an epic poem have been derived, and its canons deduced. What Homer has done has been consecrated as establishing inviolable rules to be observed by his successors. The epic is, upon the whole, the noblest form of poetry; that which demands the highest and most sustained power of imagination, combined with the simplest and purest taste. The power of tragedy is greater for the moment; for its presentations, assisted by action and visible form, are more vivid ; but the epic, possessing a wider compass, and painting only by words to the eye of the mind, has a more diversified, enduring, and tranquil operation. Rapidity, strength of passion, vehement and animated dialogue, are the essential requisites of tragedy; a calm, sustained, progressive, and sober majesty the characteristic of the epic. "Of dramatic pieces," says Herder, “ we remember sentences; the characters move before our eyes, we feel their emotions with them. But this emotion being stronger, is also briefer; it passes away. The epopee, with its more quiet working, with its proportions too vast for any stage to compass, fills the soul, and there abides." The other points noticed by Aristotle, "revolutions of fortune, recognitions,

characters, passions," are common to both, as well as to fictitious composition in prose. Every romance written on any high principle is, in fact, a prose epic; the epopee in verse merely adds to the other sources of interest the charm of poetical diction, and of those elaborate ornaments of figures and similes, which, though stately and appropriate in verse, only produce a bombastic and ridiculous effect in the prose of Fenelon, or still more in that of Macpherson.

An epic, then, is the poetical development, in narrative, of some great and interesting event, or series of events, sufficiently separate from what goes before or follows, to possess the character of a whole; having, therefore, a clear and distinct beginning, middle, and end; an action simple at first, leading into a complication of plot, and terminating in a natural and soothing solution. These are its essentials; amongst its accidental features are the employment of supernatural agency as a medium either of heightening emotion or of conducting the plot; the introduction of episodes, of formal addresses, invocations, and similes; matters which have no essential connection with epic poetry, and the propriety of the introduction of which varies with the theme, the age, and the national associations of the poet.

To the confusion of these accidental qualities, many of which are certainly quite unsuited to the taste of modern times, with those essential features which must have an equal interest for all time, must be ascribed the numerous failures which in modern times have thrown a certain discredit and air of ridicule upon the epic poem; as well as the belief that appears to prevail, that the time for epic poetry is past. Unquestionably any epic now written which deals with fabulous mythologies or exploded superstitions, and employs in the nineteenth century the long elaborate speeches, the

minutely touched similes, the formal enumeration of ships, and muster-rolls of regiments, which suited the primitive times of Homer, when description was new, will probably share the fate of Leonidas or the Epigoniad. But in the hands of a poet selecting a theme of sufficient natural and human interest, remote enough to allow play for the imagination, yet near enough to make us understand and sympathise with his actors, and treating it, not in a slavish spirit of imagination, but with the vigour and independence of original thought, we are persuaded that the epic would be found to have lost none of its power. It seems to be an entirely mistaken opinion, that the epic is only the production of an early and comparatively simple state of society, and therefore unlikely to harmonize with the more complex nature and critical taste of more advanced civilization. On the contrary, the Jerusalem of Tasso, the Paradise Lost of Milton, and the Lusiad of Camoens, the only three modern epics which deserve the name, are the productions of what may be termed the golden age in point of taste in each country, and of individuals uniting to poetical inspiration all the stores which the widest reading and most sedulous cultivation of learning could supply.

The great powers of Homer are distinguished from all modern epics, by their wonderful air of truth, their broad clear portraiture of character, infinitely varied, and yet not antithetically contrasted; their perfect absence of all affectation, false sentiment, or exaggeration, either in character or sentiment; their calm and impartial spirit; their serenity, cheerfulness, and good sense. Such a union is indeed not to be expected in a modern state of society; after poetical description has already traced all the leading outlines both of moral and material nature, and when men, insensibly and