re
All armed save hir hedes in all hir gere,
Full richely in alle manere thinges.
For trusteth wel, that erles, dukes, kinges,
Were gathered in this noble compagnie,
For love, and for encrease of chevalrie.
About this king ther ran on every part
Full many a tame leon and leopart.

What a plenitude of brilliant and powerful description! Every verse,
every half verse, adds a characterizing circumstance, a vivifying image.
And what an integrity and self-completeness has the daring and large
conception of either martial king! And how distinguishably the two stand
apart from each other! But above all, what a sudden and rich addition to
our stock of heroic poetical portraitures! Here is no imitation. Neither
Lycurge nor Emetrius is any where in poetry but here. Not in the
_Iliad_-not in the _AEneid_. You cannot compose either of them from the
heroes of antiquity. Each is original--new--self-subsisting. The monarch
of Thrace is invested with more of uncouth and savage terror. He is
bigger, broader. Might for destroying is in his bulk of bone and muscle.
Bulls draw him, and he looks taurine. A bear-skin mantles him; and you
would think him of ursine consanguinity. The huge lump of gold upon his
raven-black head, and the monster hounds, bigger than the dog-kind can
be imagined to produce, that gambol about his chariot, all betoken the
grosser character of power--the power that is in size--material. The
impression of the portentous is made without going avowedly out of the
real. His looking is resembled to that of a griffin, because in that
monster imagined at or beyond the verge of nature, the ferocity of a
devouring, destroying creature can be conceived as more wild, and grim,
and fearful than in nature's known offspring, in all of whom some
kindlier sparkles from the heart of the great mother, some
beneficently-implanted instincts are thought of as tempering and
qualifying the pure animal fierceness and rage.

The opposed King of Inde has also of the prodigious, within the limits
of the apparently natural. He is also a tremendous champion; but he has
more fire, and less of mere thewes, in the furnishing of his warlike
sufficiency. There is more of mind and fancy about him. His fair
complexion at once places him in a more gracious category of
death-doers. Compare to the car drawn by four white bulls, the gallant
bay charger barded with steel, and caparisoned with cloth of gold.
Compare to that ye