I wish I could plead guilty to the honourable charge that it contains too much learning. A distinguished critic has justly observed, that the greatest obstacle which the modern writer attempting an Epic would have to encounter, would be, in his utter impossibility to attain the requisite learning. For an Epic ought to embody the whole learning of the period in which it is composed; and in the present age that is beyond the aspiration of the most erudite scholar or the profoundest philosopher. Still, any attempt at an Heroic Poem must at least comprise all the knowledge which the nature of the subject will admit, and we cannot but observe that the greatest narrative poems are those in which the greatest amount of learning is contained. Beyond all comparison the most learned poems that exist, in reference to the age in which they are composed, are the "Iliad" and "Odyssey;" next to them, the "Paradise Lost;" next to that, the "AEneid," in which the chief charm of the six latter books is in that "exquisite erudition," which Mueller so discriminately admires in Virgil; and after these, in point of learning, come perhaps the "Divine Comedy," and the "Fairy Queen." So that I have only to regret my deficiency of learning, rather than to apologize for the excess of it. With regard to the classical allusions which I have permitted myself, I might shelter my practice under the mantles of our great masters in heroic song--Milton and Spenser; but in fact such admixture of the Classic with the Gothic muse is so essentially the characteristic of the minstrelsy of the middle ages, that without a liberal use of the same combination, I could not have preserved the colouring proper to my subject. And, indeed, I think the advice which one of the most elegant of modern critics has given to the painter, is equally applicable to the poet:-- "Non te igitur lateant antiqua numismata, gemmae, Quodque refert specie veterum post saecula mentem; Splendidior quippe ex illis assurgit imago Magnaque se rerum facies aperit meditanti."[F] [F] DU FRESNOY _de Arte Graphica_.