Apply the tests of art to Homer and judge him by those. Take the matter of the contradictions which critics have talked so much about. In many cases, especially where mythology was concerned, the material the poet had to handle bristled with inconsistencies and contradictions. Long ago Aristotle laid down the sensible rule for drama, and it is equally true for epic poetry, that the poet is not responsible for the improbabilities in his materials. The sculptor may have flaws in his block of marble; the painter may have defects in his lead or oil, or pigments; and the epic poet found contradictions in the fairy stories of mankind which he wove into the story he sang. That one consideration will sweep away instantly heaps of higher criticism. Again, the artist is more taken up with the end than he is with the means. In the fervor of his composition he wreaks himself upon expression, he burns to embody his ideal and, engrossed in that, he is likely to be less observant of the material of his art. The achieving of the effect is more to him than mathematical accuracy in the use of the instruments by which he achieves the effect. He makes his hero win his battle; he may unhappily forget some of the tactics or even the geography of the battlefield. His object is not to teach the art of warfare or furnish the topography of the country, but to tell an interesting story in an interesting way. The _Iliad_ has a wall that vexes many critics. It was built in the tenth year of the war, which was no time to build a wall, and was put up simply because Achilles left the field. Besides, according to these critics the wall appears and disappears strangely. So the conclusion is: Homer did not build the wall, but some other poet came along and projected his masonry into the epic. In answer it has been shown that the wall behaves very well, but, whether it does or not, it matters little. The poet is not a surveyor or a street commissioner. He wished to make his story interesting, to make the character of Achilles prominent, to bring some agreeable variety into what might prove a monotonous catalog of similar battles. Those are reasons enough for a poet to build a Chinese wall or reduce it to dust when he does not want it, or conveniently overlook it in the heat of an imaginary charge.