To have assumed a position so far in advance of, and so decisively discriminated from, that of any of his contemporaries, as in the _Vita Nuova_, would alone have ensured Dante immortality as a poet. But his lyrical works are to his epic as Shakespeare’s sonnets to Shakespeare’s dramas. Any narrative in verse not familiar or humorous, nor of extreme brevity, may be entitled an epic; although we might do well to naturalise, as we have done in the case of _idyll_, the pretty Greek word _epyll_ to denote a narrative composition of such compass as Keats’s _Eve of St. Agnes_ or Wordsworth’s _Laodamia_. But there are at least three classes of epics, excluding the merely romantic like the _Orlando_, and the mock-heroic, from consideration. The most important in every point of view is the national, originally not the work of a man but of a people; sometimes, as in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, indebted for its final form to the shaping hand of the most consummate genius; sometimes, as in the Finnish _Kalevala_, an agglomeration of legends, united by community of spirit, but not fashioned into an artistic whole. At the remotest point from these stands the artificial epic, like the _Teseide_ of Boccaccio or the _Jason_ of William Morris, where the poet has selected for its mere picturesqueness a subject which stands in no vital relation to himself and his times; and such epics are necessarily the most numerous. Yet there is an intermediate class of epic, partly national, partly artificial, where the poet, conscious of a high patriotic purpose, has, like Virgil and Camoens, sung the glories of his country at their zenith; or, like Lucan, actually related contemporary history; or, like Shelley in the _Revolt of Islam_, bodied this forth under the veil of allegory; or, like Tasso, embalmed ere too late the feeling of an age passing away. Two great epic poets of the intermediate class have done more than this: they have preserved and expressed the sentiment of their age, its replies to the deepest questions which man can propound; have clothed these abstractions with form, colour, and music, and have lent fleeting opinion an adamantine immortality. These are Dante and Milton.