The EPIC POEM confines within still narrower limits the narration of human events. As it borrows the language and is clothed with the colours of poetry, so it is capable of rousing the feelings more powerfully than either biography or romance, and, when crowned with success, attains a fame, and takes a hold of the hearts of men, to which nothing in prose composition can be compared. Elevation of thought, fervour of language, powerful delineation of character, are its essential qualities. But all these would prove unavailing if the one thing needful, _unity of subject_, were awanting. It is that which is its essential quality, for that alone lets in all the others. All the great Epic Poems which have appeared in the world are not only devoted to one interest, but are generally restricted in point of space and time within limits not materially wider than those of the Greek drama. The _Iliad_ not only relates exclusively the latter stages of the siege of Troy, but the whole period of its action is forty-eight days--of its absorbing interest, (the time from the storming of the Greek lines by Hector to his death by the heaven-defended Achilles,) thirty-six hours. The _Paradise Lost_ adheres strictly to unity both of subject and time: the previous battles of the angels is the subject of narrative by the angel Raphael; but the time that elapses from the convocation of the devils in Pandemonium to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise is only three days. The _Jerusalem Delivered_ has the one absorbing interest arising from the efforts of the Christians for the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre; and its time is limited to a few weeks. Virgil was so enamoured of his great predecessor that he endeavoured to imitate, in one poem, both his great works. The _AEneid_ is an _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ in one. But every one must feel that it is on the episode with Dido that the interest of the poem really rests; and that all the magic of his exquisite pencil can scarcely sustain the interest after the pious AEneas has taken his departure from the shores of Carthage. The _Lusiad_ of Camoens, necessarily, from its subject, embraced wider limits; but the one interest of the poem is as single and sustained as that of the discovery of the new world by Columbus. If any of these writers had professed in rhyme to give a history of a wider or more protracted subject, the interest would have been so much diffused as to be lost. The confusion of ideas and incidents so painfully felt by all the readers of _Orlando Furioso_, and which the boundless fancy of Ariosto was unable to prevent, proves that epic poetry has its limits, and that they are narrower than either history or romance.