ved more
copious memoirs than the fertility of this man's genius claims. His
life would have exhibited a moving picture of genius in action and in
contemplation. With all the infirmities of lively passions, he had all
the redeeming virtues of magnanimity and generous affections; but with
the dignity and the powers of a great genius, falling among an age of
wits, he was covered by ridicule. D'Avenant was a man who had viewed
human life in all its shapes, and had himself taken them. A poet and a
wit, the creator of the English stage with the music of Italy and the
scenery of France; a soldier, an emigrant, a courtier, and a
politician:--he was, too, a state-prisoner, awaiting death with his
immortal poem in his hand;[321] and at all times a philosopher!

That hardiness of enterprise which had conducted him through life,
brought the same novelty, and conferred on him the same vigour in
literature.

D'Avenant attempted to open a new vein of invention in narrative
poetry; which not to call _epic_, he termed _heroic_; and which we who
have more completely emancipated ourselves from the arbitrary mandates
of Aristotle and Bossu, have since styled romantic. Scott, Southey,
and Byron have taught us this freer scope of invention, but
characterised by a depth of passion which is not found in D'Avenant.
In his age, the title which he selected to describe the class of his
poetical narrative, was a miserable source of petty criticism. It was
decreed that every poem should resemble another poem, on the plan of
the ancient epic. This was the golden age of "the poet-apes," till
they found that it was easier to produce epic writers than epic
readers.

But our poet, whose manly genius had rejected one great absurdity, had
the folly to adopt another. The first reformers are always more heated
with zeal than enlightened by sagacity. The four-and-twenty chapters
of an epic, he perceived, were but fantastical divisions, and
probably, originally, but accidental; yet he proposed another form as
chimerical; he imagined that by having only five he was constructing
his poem on the dramatic plan of five acts. He might with equal
propriety have copied the Spanish comedy which I once read, in
twenty-five acts, and in no slender folio. "Sea-marks (says D'Avenant,
alluding to the works of antiquity) are chiefly useful to _coasters_,
and serve not those who have the ambition of _discoverers_, that love
to sail in untried seas;" and yet he was attemp