The Iliad and the Odyssey, the Beowulf and the Kalevala, exhibit these characteristics fully. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana, although indigenous in every respect, are so interminable and so shapeless that they scarcely deserve the title of poems. The metre of the Nibelungen Lied is perhaps not quite German in its ultimate origin. The metre of the Eneid, and a good deal of the substance of the first six books, are borrowed from the Greek, while its spirit is not that of a primitive age, but that of its author, Virgil, reflecting the polished court of Augustus.

The Iliad or the Odyssey will give one an idea of the folk-epic in its most artistic form; the Kalevala, in its crudest form; the Beowulf, in its arrested form, about half way to artistic finish. The Nibelungen Lied is artistically finished in its structure, but is overlaid with too much medieval frippery and sentimentality.

2. The Art Epic.-Leading examples of this are the Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, in English; Klopstock's Messiah, in German. In such poetry we find a well-known author, representative of the full intellectual and moral culture of his folk, treating a religious theme not indigenous to the folk but adopted by it, and treating this theme under the influence of or in emulation of the classic epics.

Longfellow's Hiawatha is also to be regarded as an art epic. The story is taken from the myths and legends of the North American Indians, and is wholly foreign to our Anglo-American race. The metre is that of the Kalevala (see § 192).

3. The Allegorical Epic.-Under this heading we may place Spenser's Faery Queen, Langland's Vision of Piers the Plowman (14th century), and the like. The personages are symbolic, not real (see § 117), and the doctrinal teaching is obvious throughout.

Is Dante's great poem to be placed here? The title is Divine Comedy. The term Comedy, however, as used by

Dante, did not suggest necessarily anything of a dramatic form, but meant merely a story that began sadly and ended pleasantly. Dante's poem begins in hell and ends in heaven. In form, it is a Vision, though this is not so explicitly stated as in the case of Piers the Plowman and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. In movement, it is narrative; the poet is led through the regions of hell and purgatory by the spirit of Virgil, and afterward led to heaven by the spirit of Beatrice. But the personages introduced are not all mere symbols of vice and virtue; many of them are well-known figures of history.

There is, further, the Mock Epic, in which the poet narrates a humorous incident of ordinary life, exaggerating it greatly, and imitating the tone and style of the classic epics. The best example in English is Pope's Rape of the Lock. Not only does Pope mimic grandiloquently the diction of Homer and Virgil, but he introduces the sylphs in parody of the gods and goddesses.

172. Romance. The term is used here in a very wide sense, including all narrative poems which have not the grand proportions and mythological or ethical spirit of the epic.

1. The Romance of Chivalry.-This form of poetry, extremely popular in the Middle Ages, but falling into disfavor in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, has been partially revived in the present century. The stories may be classified in three general groups, according to their subject matter, viz., the Charlemagne stories, the Arthurian, and the Classical.

The Charlemagne stories have for their subject the great Frankish emperor, as he appeared to the credulous imagination of later generations, surrounded by his twelve peers of the Round Table. The best known of his attendants are Roland, Turpin, and the traitor Ganelon. These stories were extremely popular in the Middle Ages, in France, Germany, and England. At the battle of Hastings one

of Duke William's minstrels is said to have ridden out in front of the Norman army, singing of the death of Roland. But the Charlemagne romances have not been revived in English literature of the present century.

The Arthurian stories have been revived for modern English readers in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Swinburne's Tristram of Lyonesse, Matthew Arnold's Tristram and Iseult.

The term "idyll" is not happily used by Tennyson. It means in strictness "a little picture," i. e., a short story of real rather than of legendary life. The idyll is in verse what genre and still-life are in painting. Whereas Tennyson's Arthurian poems are long stories of heroic prowess. Introducing all the leading personages of Arthur's court, they present what is technically known as the Arthurian cycle.

The Arthurian stories were, it is believed, originally the embodiment of certain mythological ideas of the Celtic race. But, even in the earliest medieval written form in which we find them, the mythological element is practically eliminated, and beings who may have been primarily gods and goddesses and demi-gods appear merely as men and women. The few traces of their descent from the gods can be detected only by the special student of comparative mythology.

The Classical Romances, embodying the curious medieval conceptions of the great men of Greece and Rome, notably of Alexander the Great, were likewise popular in the Middle Ages, but have not been revived of late.

Under this head we may put also the medieval versions, or perversions, of the Homeric and Virgilian stories of the Greeks and Trojans. The best known of these is the story of Troilus and Cressida, narrated by Chaucer and dramatized by Shakespeare.

2. Ecclesiastical Romances.-These are commonly known as Lives of the Saints. The earliest medieval lives of the

saints rested upon a substantial basis of fact. But in time they absorbed much popular superstition, and even borrowed certain features from the romances of chivalry. In the later versions it is not easy to separate fact from fiction. Among the best known may be mentioned the lives of Stephen, Andrew, Martin, Cecilia, Margaret, Katherine, Lawrence, Nicholas, Christopher, Thomas of Canterbury.

This branch of literature has not met with much favor from nineteenth-century poets, unless we except Aubrey De Vere's Legends of the Saxon Saints, Tennyson's St. Simeon Stylites, Matthew Arnold's St. Brandan, and a few others. 173. Romances of Real Life. These may be divided into Historical and Private.

3. Historical Romance.-The nature of this is abundantly illustrated in such poems as Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum, Scott's Marmion and Lady of the Lake, and Longfellow's Evangeline. The background is historical; the fortunes of the personages are directly influenced by the great political movements of the time.

4. Private Romance.-Under this head we may put such poems as Tennyson's Enoch Arden, Browning's Flight of the Duchess.

5. Idylls. The idyll has been defined above to be a little picture of still-life. The fashion was set by the Greek poet Theocritus, and imitated in Roman literature, e. g., by Virgil, in his Eclogues. Since many of the personages in this class of poetry were shepherds or goatherds, the poetry itself was commonly called pastoral, or bucolic. In several of Virgil's eclogues the rustic characters discourse -quite out of their sphere-upon political and social events of the day. The medieval imitators of Virgil developed this feature to excess, so that a pastoral poem came to mean a short piece, usually a dialogue, in which the poet uttered, from the lips of nominal shepherds, his own views upon the subjects that interested him most deeply. This medieval type of pastoral poetry is repre

sented in Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar, a collection of twelve eclogues (one for each month), in which the nominal shepherds discuss, among other topics, the religious controversies of the sixteenth century. Many of the allusions are veiled; the poet evidently deemed it best to be cautious.

It is to be remembered, however, that shepherds and shepherdesses and goatherds are not essential to idyllic poetry. Nor is it at all necessary that the characters should be interested in other matters than those of everyday life. Tennyson has reverted, in many of his shorter poems, to the spirit and manner of Theocritus. Among his genuine nineteenth-century idylls may be mentioned the following: The Miller's Daughter, The Gardener's Daughter, Dora, Audley Court, Walking to the Mail, Edwin Morris.

It is also to be remembered that the term pastoral is not restricted to narrative poetry. One variety of the drama is known as the pastoral. In Milton's Lycidas (see § 170) the life described and the names of the persons commemorated are conventionally pastoral. Similarly, Matthew Arnold's Thyrsis has touches of the pastoral.

6. Ballads. It is scarcely possible to define precisely a ballad, beyond saying that it is a narrative poem, usually very short, frequently with a good deal of dialogue, abrupt in style, impassioned in tone, and intensely dramatic or at least scenic in its action. The genuine ballad is a product of the folk, i. e., it cannot be assigned to any one author. But many excellent imitations of the folk-ballad have been written by eminent poets, e. g., Whittier's Maud Muller, Longfellow's Wreck of the Hesperus, Kingsley's Three Fishers, Cowper's humorous poem of John Gilpin. Most of the old folk-ballads are composed in rugged popular metre, with four or three beats to the line, and are upon hunting, fighting, and love-making.*

* An excellent collection, for the general public, is that by F. B. Gummere, Old English Ballads. Boston; Ginn. 1894.