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Οἴομαι, Αισθάνομαι, Σκέπτομαι, Επίσταμαι, Βούλομαι, &c. "Men's minds," as Shakspeare has somewhere said, are parcel of their fortunes," and his age was necessary and alone suited to the mind of Homer. Man viewed himself with reference to the world; not, as in the present day, the world in reference to himself; and it was this state of the mind which then made the taking of Troy the point of epic interest.

We have thus endeavored to show that the manifestation of the heroic character in the time of Homer was perfectly exhibited in outward visible action, and that this reflected from the soul of the poet addressed to a seeing and listening, rather than a reading people, was the poetry of fancy rather than sentiment. Events, characters, superstitions, customs, and traditions, all combined in rendering the Iliad a perfect embodying of the perfect outward manifestation of the heroic character of that period. The poetry of the senses, the reflection merely of nature and of heroic achievements, is not susceptible of indefinite progress; it must evidently be most perfect when the objects of visible action are noblest, and we view all else only with reference to those actions. The epic poetry of the Greeks corresponds to sculpture, and in the one, as in the other, the outward forms of life and action live and will ever live unrivalled.

It is not our purpose to show the adaptation of the rules of Aristotle to the Iliad, since from this those rules were drawn,- we would only say that according to the spirit of those rules every true epic must be formed. They are not the arbitrary decisions of a critic, but the voice of nature herself speaking through her interpreter. Aristotle studied nature in Homer; he gave no arbitrary rules, he did but trace the pleasing effects produced on the mind, and taught upon what those effects depended. He may have erred in drawing his rules from one development of the heroic character; but this was the fault of his times, not of his judgment. He did not mean that succeeding poets should bow to him, but should reverence those great principles to which he had shown that nature herself had conformed in her noblest work. The true poet will look without for no rules drawn from others; he feels within himself the living standard of the great and beautiful, and bows to that alone: as far as it has become changed by human error or imperfection, he would gladly restore it to its original purity, by a conformity to those universal laws of sublimity and beauty, which the critic has shown to be followed by nature herself.

When Aristotle tells us that the action of an epic should be one and entire, and that it should be a great action, he tells us of what constitutes its

essence, and of that without which it ceases to be such a poem. It must be one and entire that the interest may not be distracted, and that the mind may feel the harmony of all its proportions. It is not the poet of fancy who can bind by his spell the parts of such a fabric, it is the poet who has felt more strongly than any other the great moral wants of his age, that can give to such a work its unity and power. It has been well said that in reading the gay creations of Ariosto,—of his fairy bowers and castles and palaces, we are for a moment charmed and wrapt in pleasant reveries, but they are but dreams; the impression is soon shaken off; we are conscious of no master-feeling round which they gather, and which alone could render his poem an epic, the noblest of harmonious creations. But in reading the Iliad, or a tragedy like Lear or Macbeth, or in looking sometime at a painting on which, the moral sentiment of the artist is as strongly impressed as his imagination, instead of being obliged to humor the fancy that the charm may be kept alive, we shall with difficulty shake off the impression, when it is necessary to return to the real business of life. It is in the greatness of the epic action that the poets succeeding Homer, if we except Milton have failed; and the causes which have operated against them, will always operate with increasing force against every attempt to represent the present or

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