future development of the heroic character in action. It is in the childhood of the human mind alone, that the interval between thought and action is the widest, and therefore it is then alone that the events occupying that interval can be best described. The great struggle of the epic poets since the time of Homer has been against this narrowing of their field of action, and making the instruments there employed less visible, less tangible. The wonder and interest of the world is now transferred to the mind, whose thought is action, and whose word is power. Lord Kames therefore erred, when he said "that it was the familiarity of modern manners that unqualified them for epic poetry, and that the dignity of present manners would be better understood in future ages, when they are no longer familiar." The fact is, our manners, or the manners and actions of any intellectual nation, can never become the representatives of greatness, they have fallen from the high sphere which they occupied in a less advanced stage of the human mind, never to regain it. This will account for the appearance among us of such works as the "Sartor Resartus," whose object is to impress the forms of physical life with a greatness no longer belonging to them, and which we recognise only in spiritual action.

These remarks will show why it was that Virgil failed in making the same impression on his age,

that was made by his great model. His poem is but a lunar reflection of the Iliad; and it was perhaps from a deep consciousness of this, that he ordered it in his will to be burned. That poem, which was the natural expression of the early features of society, could only be faintly copied by the mimic hand of art. Virgil's subject is well chosen, and would not have shone with reflected light had it been treated of in the early days of Rome. He summoned again from their long sleep the heroes and gods of Troy, but they appeared with dimmed glory amid the brightness of another age. He had, as we have before observed, chosen the right point in time for his action, a time of tradition, affording him all the advantages possessed by Homer, but not to transgress the laws of probability, he could not give his hero the character of another age, he could not make Æneas the Achilles of the Romans. Virgil as well as Lucan has been blamed by the critics; the one, for not giving to his hero the dignity of thought becoming the heroic character of his own time; the other, for not placing his action beyond the strict bounds of history. In regard to each we think the critics have erred; for neither the time nor the characters could have been changed without producing a strange incongruity.

Thus the epic poets of Greece and Rome, who succeeded Homer, must have labored under peculiar

disadvantages to which those of modern times are are not subjected. If, like Virgil, they had chosen the same time for their action with Homer, they could not transfer to it the heroic spirit of their own day, at least, in its noblest development, — they could not make a Cato or a Brutus cotemporary with an Achilles or an Ajax ;- they must evoke the heroic spirits of other days, spirits reluctant to obey the spells employed by the magicians of another age. Virgil, as well as every other poet whose action lies in times very far distant from his own, has not the greatest difficulty to overcome, in exhibiting characters moved by those same affections and sympathies which unite the ceaseless generations of men, in giving to the slumbering past the emotions of the present; but in adapting to the story of a former age, and perhaps foreign nation, that peculiar system of manners which constitutes the outward development of the heroic spirit, and of which no mind, but such as has been subjected to its actual influence, can either strongly feel or vividly describe. These manners perish with their age, — there is no hand of enchantment to wave over them and convert them, like the fabled city of Arabian romance, into living stone; no convulsion of nature, like that which covered Pompeii, to wrap them in a veil which future ages might withdraw, and permit them, untouched by the hand of time, to stand unimpaired

We

amid the ruins of the past, and gaze with wonder on the new-risen generations of men. But if, like Lucan, they took their subject from the hands of History, the skepticism of a more advanced age deprived them of the use of machinery, and consequently of the power of exciting that admiration, which is the leading aim of the epic poem. need not stop to show how ridiculous Iris would have appeared on the plains of Pharsalia bringing a sword to Pompey, or Venus coming to snatch him away in a cloud. It is evident that the poet, forced to follow in the same path with the historian, must feel the bonds of reality continually restraining and checking his native energies.

These difficulties the influence of Christianity overcame, but subjected the epic poet to others still more discouraging, as I shall endeavor to show by a brief reference to Tasso, Dante, and Milton.

The subject chosen by Tasso, and the time of the action of his poem, bore the same relation to Christian civilization as Homer's did to Grecian. It was the only age in which the heroic Christian character could be fully manifested in outward action. This resulted from a peculiar state of the mind which, as we have said in regard to heroic manners, perishes with its age, with the circumstances that called it forth. It was a new development of the Homeric spirit modified by Christianity. The interest as in

the Iliad and neid is all without, and this it is which gives to the poem of Tasso, as to the other two, the true epic interest, and adds a dignity to the manners of these poems belonging to no other, where the subject is taken from the common events of life. The subject, too, as it presented a scene for the display of action resulting from a purer faith, possesses a dignity far surpassing that of his two great predecessors. Thus fortunate in his subject and in the time of his action, he was equally favored by the popular belief of his age. By the superstition of his own time he was enabled to oppose with success the light of reality which was thrown around his subject by history, and give to it that supernatural interest, which is found so capable of exciting admiration. However, in our cooler moments, we may laugh at his magicians and their incantations, as they are not mere embodied abstractions, like Voltaire's agents, but founded on the actual belief of his day, they will always possess a reality to the mind; and, when in reading we have yielded for a time to our feelings, will again assert their power. We have placed Tasso before Dante, in order of time, because he has given an earlier development of the heroic character. He would, doubtless, have possessed as well as Virgil, whom he has so closely followed, greater originality, and more strongly ex