KNIGHT OF THE MOST NOBLE ORDER OF THE GARTER,

A

N Heroic Poem, truly fuch, is undoubtedly the greatest work which the foul of a man is capable to perform. The defign of it is to form the mind to heroic virtue by example; it is conveyed in verse, that it may delight while it inftructs: the action of it is always one, entire, and great. The least and most trivial epifodes, or under-actions, which are interwoven in it, are parts either neceffary, or convenient, to carry on the main defign. Either fo neceffary, that without them the poem must be imperfect; or fo convenient, that no others can be imagined more fuitable to the place in which they are. There is nothing to be left void in a firm building; even the cavities ought not to be filled with rubbish, which is of a perishable kind, deftructive to the ftrength: but with brick or stone, though

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though of lefs pieces, yet of the fame nature, and fitted to the crannies. Even the least portions of them must be of the epic kind; all things must be grave, majestical, and fublime: nothing of a foreign nature, like the trifling novels, which Ariftotle and others have inferted in their poems by which the reader is misled into another fort of pleasure, oppofite to that which is defigned in an epic poem. One raises the foul, and hardens it to virtue; the other foftens it again, and unbends it into vice. One conduces to the poet's aim, the compleating of his work; which he is driving on, labouring and haftening in every line: the other flackens his pace, diverts him from his way, and locks him up like a knight-errant in an enchanted castle, when he fhould be pursuing his first adventure. Statius, as Boffu has well observed, was ambitious of trying his ftrength with his mafter Virgil, as Virgil had before tried his with Homer. The Grecian gave the two Romans an example, in the games which were celebrated at the funerals of Patroclus. Virgil imitated the invention of Homer, but changed the fports. But both the Greek and Latin poet took their occafions from the fubject; though, to confefs the truth, they were both ornamental, or, at best, convenient parts of it, rather than of neceffity arifing from it. Statius, who, through his whole poem, is noted for want of conduct and judgment, instead of staying, as he might have done, for the death of Capaneus, Hippomedon, Tydeus, or fome other of his seven champions (who are heroes all alike), or more properly for the tragical end of the two brothers,

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brothers, whofe exequies the next fucceffor had leisure to perform, when the fiege was raised, and in the interval betwixt the poet's first action and his fecond, went out of his way, as it were on propenfe malice, to commit a fault: for he took his opportunity to kill a royal infant, by the means of a serpent (that author of all evil), to make way for those funeral honours which he intended for him. Now if this innocent had been of any relation to his Thebais; if he had either furthered or hindered the taking of the town, the poet might have found fome forry excuse at least for the detaining the reader from the promised fiege. On thefe terms, this Capaneus of a poet engaged his two immortal predeceffors, and his fuccefs was answerable to his enterprize.

If this œconomy must be observed in the minutest parts of an epic poem, which, to a common reader, seem to be detached from the body, and almost independent of it, what foul, though fent into the world with great advantages of nature, cultivated with the liberal arts and fciences, converfant with histories of the dead, and enriched with obfervations on the living, can be fufficient to inform the whole body of fo great a work? I touch here but tranfiently, without any ftrict method, on fome few of those many rules of imitating nature, which Ariftotle drew from Homer's Iliads and Odyffes, and which he fitted to the drama; furnishing himself alfo with obfervations from the practice of the theatre, when it flourished under Æschylus, Eurypides, and Sophocles. For the original of the

VOL. V.

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ftage

:

ftage was from the epic poem. Narration, doubtless, preceded acting, and gave laws to it; what at first was told artfully, was, in procefs of time, reprefented gracefully to the fight and hearing. Thofe epifodes of Homer, which were proper for the stage, the poets amplified each into an action: out of his limbs they formed their bodies: what he had contracted they enlarged out of one Hercules were made infinity of pygmies; yet all endued with human fouls: for from him their great creator, they have each of them the "divinæ particulum auræ." They flowed from him at first, and are at last resolved into him. Nor were they only animated by him, but their measure and fymmetry was owing to him. His one, entire, and great action was copied by them according to the proportions of the drama: if he finished his orb within the year, it fufficed to teach them, that their action being lefs, and being alfo lefs diverfified with incidents, their orb, of confequence, must be circumfcribed in a lefs compafs, which they reduced within the limits either of a natural or an artificial day: fo that as he taught them to amplify what he had shortened, by the fame rule applied the contrary way, he taught them to fhorten what he had amplified. Tragedy is the miniature of human life: an epic poem is the draught at length. Here, my Lord, I must contract alfo; for, before I was aware, I was almost running into a long digreffion, to prove that there is no fuch abfolute neceffity that the time of a stage-action should so strictly be confined to twenty-four hours, as never to exceed them, for which Aristotle