as antecedent and consequent, though we
are occasionally perplexed by inconsistencies of detail. To deal
with these latter, is a portion of the duties of a critic; but he
is not to treat the _Iliad_ as if inconsistency prevailed every
where throughout its parts; for coherence of parts--symmetrical
antecedence and consequence--is discernible throughout the larger
half of the poem.

"Now the Wolfian theory explains the gaps and contradictions
throughout the narrative, but it explains nothing else. If (as
Lachmann thinks) the _Iliad_ originally consisted of sixteen songs
or little substantive epics, not only composed by different
authors, but by each without any view to conjunction with the
rest--we have then no right to expect any intrinsic continuity
between them; and all that continuity which we now find must be of
extraneous origin. Where are we to look for the origin? Lachmann
follows Wolf in ascribing the whole constructive process to
Peisistratus and his associates, at the period when the creative
epical faculty is admitted to have died out. But upon this
supposition, Peisistratus (or his associate) must have done much
more than omit, transpose, and interpolate, here and there; he must
have gone far to re-write the whole poem. A great poet might have
re-cast pre-existing separate songs into one comprehensive whole,
but no mere arrangers or compilers would be competent to do so; and
we are thus left without any means of accounting for that degree of
continuity and consistency which runs through so large a portion of
the _Iliad_, though not through the whole. The idea that the poem
as we read it grew out of atoms, not originally designed for the
places which they now occupy, involves us in new and inextricable
difficulties when we seek to elucidate either the mode of
coalescence or the degree of existing unity.

"Admitting, then, premeditated adaptation of parts to a certain
extent as essential to the _Iliad_, we may yet inquire whether it
was produced all at once or gradually enlarged--whether by one
author or by several; and, if the parts be of different age, which
is the primitive kernel, and which are the additions?

"Welcker, Lange, and Nitzeh, treat the Homeric poems as
representing a second step in advance in the progress of popular