Count of Champagne, who, after having been one of the chief actors in it, wrote the history of it; and his work, strictly historical as to facts, and admirably epic in description of character and warmth of coloring, is one of the earliest and finest monuments of French literature.

The series builds up a decidedly epic significance, and its manner is extraordinarily suggestive of a new epic method.

The usual attempts at stricter definition of epic than anything this chapter contains, are either, in spite of what they try for, so vague that they would admit almost any long stretch of narrative poetry; or else they are based on the accidents or devices of epic art; and in that case they are apt to exclude work which is essentially epic because something inessential is lacking.

As in Macaulay's immortal, if somewhat jingly epic, "those behind cried 'Forward' and those before cried 'Back'!"

It is a decided disadvantage, from the purely epic point of view, that those admirable "Intelligences" in Hardy's The Dynasts are so obviously abstract ideas disguised.

In all these poems, we see an epic intention still combined with a recognizably epic manner.

It seemed unlikely after the Alexandrians had made such poor attempts at standing upright under the immensity of Homer; it seemed so, until, after several efforts, Latin poetry became triumphantly epic in Virgil.