Thou preferrest the mitre to the laurel chaplet, and the hymns of Gregory to the epics of Homer?" "O Phoebus," replied Nonnus, "were it any God but thou, I should bend before him in silence, having nought to reply.

The characteristic quality, according to Aristotle, which is possessed by the Socratic dialogs, by the Homeric epics, and by the dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and which classifies them together as poetic, is not verse but mimesis, imitation.

For such purposes no poetry was thought to be better than Homer, whose epics furnish so many examples of heroic conduct.

We shall have men arise and write epics on it, when they have learnt that "to the pure all things are pure," and that science and usefulness contain a divine element, even in their lowest appliances.' 'Write one yourself, and call it the Chadwickiad.' 'Why not? 'Smells and the Man I sing.

The Mahabharata is one of the great epics of ancient India.

In place of the gods and goddesses of the great epics, however, the fairy-like sylphs help to guide the action of this poem.

Only in satyr-plays, in the comic epics, and for a few extravagant characters in comedy (such as the boastful soldier) were grotesque appellations employed.

But even with the help of all his epics it has failed to secure him any such place in the estimation of posterity.

Do the work that's nearest, Though it's dull at whiles, Helping, when we meet them, Lame dogs over stiles; See in every hedgerow Marks of angels' feet, Epics in each pebble Underneath our feet; Once a year, like schoolboys, Robin-Hooding go, Leaving fops and fogies A thousand feet below.

We will venture to oppose his Third Canto of the Story of Rimini for classic elegance and natural feeling to any equal number of lines from Mr. Southey's Epics or from Mr. Moore's Lalla Rookh.

Few persons will dispute that the two great Homeric poems are the most delightful of epics; they may not have the sublimity of the "Paradise Lost," nor the picturesqueness of the "Divine Comedy," nor the etherial brilliancy of the "Orlando"; but, dead as they are in language, metre, accent,obsolete in religion, manners, costume, and country, they nevertheless even now please all those who can read them beyond all other narrative poems.

The history of Arthur is not an epic as it stands, but neither was the Cyclic song, of which the greatest of all epics, the "Iliad," handles a part.

Epics are out of fashion; even Homer and Virgil would hardly be read in our time, but that people are unwilling to admit their schooling to have been thrown away.

There are also two epics, one The Thebaïd of Statius, and The Epigoni sometimes attributed to Homer and sometimes to one of the Cyclic poets of Greece.

Gods and heroes: myths and epics of ancient Greece

Folktale, fiction and saga in the Homeric epics.

But, although we are not to be always reading epics, and are chiefly in the mood for slighter things, to be absolutely unable to read Milton or Dante with enjoyment, is to be in a very bad way.

Communication is no longer by words, but by the instancing of whole biographies, epics, systems of philosophy, and epochs of history, in bulk.

The landscape and people of her native land seem to her as eminently suitable motives, and these realities she renders in the spirit of a by-gone agethat of the national heroes of the sagas and epics of the country, or the lyric atmosphere of the folk-songs.

If people had said that epics were only fit for children and nursemaids, 'Paradise Lost' might have been an average pantomime: it might have been called 'Harlequin Satan, or How Adam 'Ad 'em.'

This is the so-called "classical cycle," or the romances based on the Greek and Latin epics, which were very popular during the age of chivalry.

Dippold, G. T., (translations, Great Epics of Mediaeval Germany, Roberts Bros., Boston,), 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 188, 190, 195, 237, 239.

Gudrun, (translations by Dippold, Great Epics of mediaeval Germany, Roberts Bros., Boston), 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34.

Islands invaded by vikings, 276; epics, 303; post-classical writings, 303; rhapsodists' work continued, 304; writers busy with Alexander, 305. GREN'DEL.

Version of Reynard, 35; poem of Walther von Wasgenstein, 124; chronicle attributed to Turpin, 129; version of Roland, 130; version of Tristan, 234; epics, 303; writers and Alexander, 305.