With the advent of Chaucer a new poet, a new language, and new themes appear.  Many of his Canterbury tales are miniature epics, borrowed in general from other writers, but retold with a charm all his own.  The Knight’s Tale, or story of the rivalry in love of Palamon and Arcite, the tale of Gamelyn, and that of Troilus and Cressida, all contain admirable epic passages.

Spenser, our next epic poet, left us the unfinished Faerie Queene, an allegorical epic which shows the influence of Ariosto and other Italian poets, and contains exquisitely beautiful passages descriptive of nature, etc.  His allegorical plot affords every facility for the display of his graceful verse, and is outlined in another chapter.

There are two curious but little-known English epics, William Warner’s chronicle epic entitled “Albion’s England” (1586), and Samuel Daniel’s “Civil Wars.”  The first, beginning with the flood, carries the reader through Greek mythology to the Trojan War, and hence by means of Brut to the beginnings of English history, which is then continued to the execution of Mary Stuart.  The second (1595) is an epic, in eight books, on the Wars of the Roses.  Drayton also wrote, on the theme of the Civil Wars, an epic entitled “The Barons’ Wars,” and undertook a descriptive and patriotic epic in “Polyolbion,” wherein he makes a tour of England relating innumerable local legends.

Abraham Cowley composed an epic entitled “Davideis,” or the troubles of David.  He begins this work in four books with a description of two councils held in Heaven and hell in regard to the life of this worthy.

Dryden was not only a translator of the classic epics, but projected an epic of his own about Arthur.  Almost at the same time Pope was planning to write one on Brut, but he too failed to carry out his intentions, and is best known as the translator of the Iliad, although some authorities claim the “Rape of the Lock” is a unique sample of the epopee galante.

The poet Keats, whose life was so short, left us a complete mythological epic in “Endymion,” a fragment of one in “Hyperion,” and a reproduction of one of the old romances in “Isabella, or a Pot of Basil.”

Shelley, Keats’ contemporary, wrote poems abounding in epic passages,—­“Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude,” “The Revolt of Islam,” “Adonais,” and “Prometheus Unbound”; while Byron’s epical poems are “Manfred,” “The Corsair,” and “Don Juan”; and Scott’s, “The Lay of the Last Minstrel,” “Marmion,” “The Lady of the Lake,” and “The Bridal of Triermain.”

The greatest of Coleridge’s poems, “The Ancient Mariner,” is sometimes called a visionary epic, while his “Christabel” conforms more closely to the old roman d’adventure.

As the translator of the epical romances of “Amadis de Gaule” and “Palmerin,” Southey won considerable renown; he also wrote the oriental epics “Thalaba” and “The Curse of Kehama,” as well as epical poems on “Madoc,” “Joan of Arc,” and “Roderick, the Last of the Goths.”