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 (ourselves included) have produced literary forms unknown to the Greeks, or that countries widely removed from European culture possess such forms as no European language can correctly express, because among no European people have they been developed. Our à priori notions of "epic," "lyric," "dramatic," can only be dispelled by such comparisons; and not until we have taken the trouble to trace the rise of different species of literature in different countries, and have thus learned the more or less different general and special ideas of literature entertained in each, can we hope to rise above the gross errors to which such à priori notions must expose us.

We have already seen the weakness of searching for universal conceptions of the “lyric; " let us now turn for illustrations of a similar weakness to the "epic." When Hallam contrasts Paradise Lost in choice of subject with the Iliad, Odyssey, Æneid, Pharsalia, Thebaid, Jerusalem Delivered, he implies that all these poems belong to a common species which he calls "heroic poetry; " and, according to Macaulay, in his comparison of Milton with Dante, this is "the highest class of human compositions." Now, whether we use the name "epic" or "heroic " is, of course, a verbal matter; the important point is that we declare certain poems of very different ages and countries to possess certain common characteristics, and to approach some universal model. Of such a model Coleridge was evidently thinking when he said