eat, complex action. The
principal personages must belong to the high places of the world, and
must be grand and elevated in their ideas and in their bearing. The
measure must be of sonorous dignity, befitting the subject. The action
is carried on by a mixture of narrative, dialogue, and soliloquy.
Briefly to express its main characteristics, the epic treats of one
great complex action, in grand style, and with fullness of detail."

Under such a definition there can be but few really great epics in any
language. Comparatively few poets have cared to undertake so great a
task and many of those who have been willing to make the attempt have
failed conspicuously in the execution. But most of the great languages
of the world have each one surpassing epic which has held the interest
of its readers and established an immortality for itself. Homer gave the
Greeks the grandeur of his _Iliad_; Virgil charms the Latin race and
every cultivated people since with the elegance of his _Aeneid_; Dante
with Virgil for his model and Beatrice as an inspiration wrote in
Italian the _Divina Commedia_, in which he described with all-powerful
pen the condition of the dead in the Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise;
and our Milton after years of preparation, from the dark realm of his
own blindness, produced the sublime measures of _Paradise Lost_. These
are the Greater Epics, greater by far than anything else written by man.
With them this course does not concern itself to any great extent.

The term lesser epic includes the numerous forms of narrative poems from
the old-time ballad to the modern story-telling poem. The epic is
essentially different from the lyric. While in the latter the
personality of the author is always apparent, and properly so, in the
epic the intrusion of the poet's self is usually a defect. The lyric is
subjective, the epic objective. To tell a story effectively and well is
the prime motive, to tell it beautifully and in a way to excite the
imagination and move the feelings of the reader is the contributory
poetic impulse. Of the lesser epics groups might be set apart. The
ballad is the oldest form. It was originally the production of wandering
minstrels or glee-men and was not reduced to writing and kept in
permanent form. Being passed from mouth to mouth there naturally came
to be great variations in its form, and even the incidents were modified
to suit the taste of the singer. After poetry came to be a study of the