Was an heroic poem, written by Sir William Davenant in 1650. It is composed in rhymed quatrains, and upon the taste of our own day leaves no other impression than that of unparalleled dulness. But in the eyes of the author and his friends it seemed an attempt of the first importance. Not only did it earn the unstinted praise of Waller and Cowley, but it was ushered in by a tedious and obscure preface, addressed to Hobbes, in which the errors of previous epic poets were set forth, and in which the ambitious purposes of the writer, and his determination to avoid such flights of imagination as he thinks have vitiated other epics, are explained. He is not always consistent with himself: for while he hopes that the rhymed verse will enable it, with the more ease, to be recited at village feasts, he yet professes to write, not for the common taste of mankind, but for those whom he calls 'necessary men,' i. e. men of light and leading. Hobbes answers the preface by stating his testimony 'briefly thus: I never yet saw poem, that had so much shape of art, health of morality, and vigour and beauty of expression, as this of yours.' Such is the worth of contemporary literary criticism judged by the standards of another age. The poem did not escape some satirical attacks, and its reception generally seems not to have answered Davenant's hopes so far as to encourage him to complete it: but he consoles himself with the thought that the fame denied by his own age will be accorded by posterity; and Hobbes adhered to his own opinion in its favour, even after the attacks of the wits. Rymer was more chary of his praise, but still thought that there ran 'something roughly noble through the whole.'