Most obedient servant,
JOHN DRYDEN.



A DISCOURSE ON EPIC POETRY.
ADDRESSED TO THE MOST HONOURABLE
JOHN, LORD MARQUIS OF NORMANBY,
EARL OF MULGRAVE, ETC., AND KNIGHT OF THE MOST NOBLE ORDER
OF THE GARTER.



An heroic poem (truly such) is undoubtedly the greatest work which
the soul of man is capable to perform. The design of it is to form
the mind to heroic virtue by example; it is conveyed in verse that
it may delight while it instructs. The action of it is always one,
entire, and great. The least and most trivial episodes or under-
actions which are interwoven in it are parts either necessary or
convenient to carry on the main design--either so necessary that
without them the poem must be imperfect, or so convenient that no
others can be imagined more suitable to the place in which they are.
There is nothing to be left void in a firm building; even the
cavities ought not to be filled with rubbish which is of a
perishable kind--destructive to the strength--but with brick or
stone (though of less pieces, yet of the same nature), and fitted to
the crannies. Even the least portions of them must be of the epic
kind; all things must be grave, majestical, and sublime; nothing of
a foreign nature, like the trifling novels which Ariosto and others
have inserted in their poems, by which the reader is misled into