Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/122

 106 French, Italian, and Portuguese, to the great relief of Miss Seward, who hated to think that the immortality of such a work depended upon the preservation of a single tongue. "Should that tongue perish," she wrote proudly, "translations would at least retain all the host of beauties which do not depend upon felicities of verbal expression."

If the interminable epics which were so popular in these halcyon days had condescended to the telling of stories, we might believe that they were read, or at least occasionally read, as a substitute for prose fiction. But the truth is that most of them are solid treatises on morality, or agriculture, or therapeutics, cast into the blankest of blank verse, and valued, presumably, for the sake of the information they conveyed. Their very titles savour of statement rather than of inspiration. Nobody in search of romance would take up Dr. Grainger's "Sugar Cane," or Dyer's "Fleece," or the Rev. Richard Polwhele's "English Orator." Nobody desiring to be idly amused would read the "Vales of Weaver," or a long didactic poem on "The Influence of Local