d the various perplexities
of metre, occasioned by the loss of the digamma, were corrected by
different grammatical stratagems. But the whole history of this lost
letter is very curious, and is rendered intelligible only by the
supposition that the Iliad and Odyssey belonged for a wide space of time
to the memory, the voice, and the ear exclusively." [152]

Many of these facts are of course fully recognized by the Wolfians; but
the inference drawn from them, that the Homeric poems began to exist in
a piecemeal condition, is, as we have seen, unnecessary. These poems may
indeed be compared, in a certain sense, with the early sacred and
epic literature of the Jews, Indians, and Teutons. But if we assign a
plurality of composers to the Psalms and Pentateuch, the Mahabharata,
the Vedas, and the Edda, we do so because of internal evidence furnished
by the books themselves, and not because these books could not have been
preserved by oral tradition. Is there, then, in the Homeric poems any
such internal evidence of dual or plural origin as is furnished by
the interlaced Elohistic and Jehovistic documents of the Pentateuch? A
careful investigation will show that there is not. Any scholar who
has given some attention to the subject can readily distinguish the
Elohistic from the Jehovistic portions of the Pentateuch; and, save in
the case of a few sporadic verses, most Biblical critics coincide in the
separation which they make between the two. But the attempts which have
been made to break up the Iliad and Odyssey have resulted in no such
harmonious agreement. There are as many systems as there are critics,
and naturally enough. For the Iliad and the Odyssey are as much alike
as two peas, and the resemblance which holds between the two holds also
between the different parts of each poem. From the appearance of the
injured Chryses in the Grecian camp down to the intervention of Athene
on the field of contest at Ithaka, we find in each book and in each
paragraph the same style, the same peculiarities of expression, the same
habits of thought, the same quite unique manifestations of the faculty
of observation. Now if the style were commonplace, the observation
slovenly, or the thought trivial, as is wont to be the case in
ballad-literature, this argument from similarity might not carry with it
much conviction. But when we reflect that throughout the whole course
of human history no other works, save the best tragedies of Shakespear