about a character, or grouped about a single characteristic of human nature. We have need in the world to tell stories that are larger, that require an ampler stage for their development; that deal not only with single principles, and single men, but with many principles and vast masses of men—that concern not for a moment, or an hour, and a single epoch of human life, but concern vast reaches of time and vaster interests of humanity. And so it has come to pass that in our modern times, our poetry—our epic poetry and our dramatic poetry—the two highest forms of literary art, have undergone a great transformation. The poem has become a novel. The epic has passed into this form; and the drama has become history. Carlyle says that it is the business of the poet to write history. We make distinction between prose and poetry, but we ought to remember that with regard to epic poetry, and dramatic poetry, both are to be expressed either in verse or prose, and that versification is an accident. There may be epic poems in prose; and, as the freest form, prose has become the prevailing form, and poetry is, more and more, as the world grows older, confined to the lyric jingle. Poetry, in the old sense, soon will pass, and the drama has passed into unversified poetry. Milton made a great change by adopting blank verse, and Shakspere had started us on the same road. In our age the great works of poetic language may be expected to be produced in what is technically prose. The epic poem may also be dramatically constructed, so that we may have the prose epic under form of the drama. Let me call attention to the fact that we are fortunate in speaking a tongue, the imperial language, in which Shakspere practically killed the old Aristotelian unities. He wanted a dramatic form in which to tell the story of the fall of Julius Cæsar, and the story of English history. He had to discard the old unities of time and place. The only Aristotelian unity that remains in our English literature is that of subject. The subject of a dramatic action, or an epic story, must have unity. There must be one action having a beginning, a middle, and an end; and there must be a constant, regular, orderly, striking, impressive advance from the beginning to the end.