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To have assumed a position so far in advance of, and so decisively discriminated from, that of any of his contemporaries, as in theVita 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’sEve of St. Agnes or Wordsworth’sLaodamia. But there are at least three classes of epics, excluding the merely romantic like theOrlando, 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 theIliad andOdyssey, 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 theTeseide of Boccaccio or theJason 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.