I am opposed to regarding a line as ‘late’ merely because it contradicts one’s theory. The critics have no such scruples, they excise capriciously. But this line not only contradicts my theory, it contradicts the uniform unbroken tenor of both epics. It is a saying of the Iron Age, when ‘iron’ has become a synonym for ‘weapon’, as in Thucydides and Shakespeare. But everywhere else in the epics the metallic synonym for ‘weapon’ is ‘bronze’. The metallic synonym for ‘tool’ is ‘iron’. Men are ‘smitten with the bronze’, trees are ‘felled with the iron’. I think that, in these circumstances, it is not inconsistent to doubt the line’s antiquity. If we accept it, we must suppose that one solitary late minstrel out of hundreds (on the separatist theory) let the cat out of the bag and enabled us to be sure that an indefinite amount of the epics was composed in the full-blown Age of Iron, though all the other later poets firmly kept the secret by invariably giving to the heroes weapons of bronze. Mr. Ridgeway is against me. He writes: ‘The Homeric warrior ... has regularly, as we have seen, spear and sword of iron.’ He may see it so, but Homer saw it otherwise, and never gives a warrior an iron sword or spear (_Early Age of Greece_, vol. i, p. 301). No early poet, perhaps no poet, can avoid, in religion and myth, barbaric and savage survivals, owing to the nature of the legendary materials on which his works are based. Nobody, we may almost say, invents a plot: all borrow from the huge store of world-wide primaeval _Märchen_, or folk-tales. In the _Odyssey_, _Marmion_, and _Ivanhoe_, the plot rests on the return of the husband or lover from unknown wanderings, unrecognized, except in _Ivanhoe_ and the _Odyssey_, by the faithful swineherd. This is a plot of _Märchen_ all over the world. Gerland, and, recently, Mr. Crooke and others, have studied the _Märchen_ embedded in Homer. One such story is that of the Shifty Lad in Dasent’s _Tales from the Norse_, and the Shifty Lad is only a human representative of the shifty beast, Brer Rabbit or another, who is so common in savage folklore. Now Homer, in the character of Odysseus, merely combines the Returned Husband with the Shifty Lad. It would not be hard to show that Odysseus is really the hero of the _Iliad_, as well as of the _Odyssey_, the man whom the poet admires most, and _he_ is the real ‘stormer of the city’ of Ilios. He is the type of sagacious, resolute, indomitable courage; the thoroughly well-balanced man, the most tenacious in war. But, in the _Odyssey_, the nature of the original _Märchen_, as in the encounter with the Cyclops, and the necessity for preserving his disguise, when he returns to Ithaca, compel the poet to make Odysseus foolhardy and an ingenious liar. The sentiment of Homer’s audience and of Homer is with Achilles when he says that he ‘hates a lie like the gates of hell’. But the given material does not permit Odysseus to cherish this chivalrous disdain