Nothing in the history of literature seems more startling than the sudden spring with which English poetry blossomed in the later years of Elizabeth’s reign. We may account for the seemingly unheralded apparition of a single genius like Dante or Chaucer by the genius itself; for, given that, everything else is possible. But even in such cases as these much must have gone before to make the genius available when it came. For the production of great literature there must be already a language ductile to all the varying moods of expression. There must be a certain amount of culture, or the stimulus of sympathy would be wanting. If, as Horace tells us, the heroes who lived before Agamemnon have perished for want of a poet to celebrate them, so doubtless many poets have gone dumb to their graves, or, at any rate, have uttered themselves imperfectly, for lack of a fitting vehicle or of an amiable atmosphere. Genius, to be sure, makes its own opportunity, but the circumstances must be there out of which it can be made. For instance, I cannot help feeling that Turold, or whoever was the author of the “Chanson de Roland,” was endowed with a rare epical faculty, and that he would have given more emphatic proof of it had it been possible for him to clothe his thought in a form equivalent to the vigor of his conception. Perhaps with more art, he might have had less of that happy audacity of the first leap which Montaigne valued so highly, but would he not have gained could he have spoken to us in a verse as sonorous as the Greek hexameter, nay, even as sweet in its cadences, as variously voluble by its slurs and elisions, and withal as sharply edged and clean cut as the Italian pentameter? It is at least a question open to debate. Mr. Matthew Arnold taxes the “Song of Roland” with an entire want of the grand style; and this is true enough; but it has immense stores of courage and victory in it, as Taillefer proved at the battle of Hastings,--yes, and touches of heroic pathos, too.