It is the kind which occurs quite locally and on a petty scale, with causes obscurer than ever.  The Border Ballads, for instance, and the Robin Hood Ballads, clearly suppose a state of society which is nothing but a very circumscribed and not very important heroic age.  Here the households of gentry take the place of courts, and the poetry in vogue there is perhaps instantly taken up by the taverns; or perhaps this is a case in which the heroes are so little removed from common folk that celebration of individual prowess begins among the latter, not, as seems usually to have happened, among the social equals of the heroes.  But doubtless there are infinite grades in the structure of the Heroic Age.

The note of the Heroic Age, then, is vehement private individuality freely and greatly asserting itself.  The assertion is not always what we should call noble; but it is always forceful and unmistakable.  There would be, no doubt, some social and religious scheme to contain the individual’s self-assertion; but the latter, not the former, is the thing that counts.  It is not an age that lasts for very long as a rule; and before there comes the state in which strong social organization and strong private individuality are compatible—­mutually helpful instead of destroying one another, as they do, in opposite ways, in savagery and in the Heroic Age—­before the state called civilization can arrive, there has commonly been a long passage of dark obscurity, which throws up into exaggerated brightness the radiance of the Heroic Age.  The balance of private good and general welfare is at the bottom of civilized morals; but the morals of the Heroic Age are founded on individuality, and on nothing else.  In Homer, for instance, it can be seen pretty clearly that a “good” man is simply a man of imposing, active individuality[2]; a “bad” man is an inefficient, undistinguished man—­probably, too, like Thersites, ugly.  It is, in fact, an absolutely aristocratic age—­an age in which he who rules is thereby proven the “best.”  And from its nature it must be an age very heartily engaged in something; usually fighting whoever is near enough to be fought with, though in Beowulf it seems to be doing something more profitable to the civilization which is to follow it—­taming the fierceness of surrounding circumstance and man’s primitive kind.  But in any case it has a good deal of leisure; and the best way to prevent this from dragging heavily is (after feasting) to glory in the things it has done; or perhaps in the things it would like to have done.  Hence heroic poetry.  But exactly what heroic poetry was in its origin, probably we shall never know.  It would scarcely be history, and it would scarcely be very ornate poetry.  The first thing required would be to translate the prowess of champions into good and moving narrative; and this would be metrified, because so it becomes both more exciting and more easily remembered.  Each succeeding bard would improve, according to his