"To a certain extent, the _Iliad_ is open to all these remarks, though Wolf and W. Mueller, and above all, Lachmann, exaggerate the case in degree. And from hence has been deduced the hypothesis which treats the part in their original state as separate integers, independent of, and unconnected with each other, and forced into unity only by the afterthought of a subsequent age; or sometimes not even themselves as integers, but as aggregates grouped together out of fragments still smaller--short epics formed by the coalescence of still shorter songs. Now there is some plausibility in these reasonings, so long as the _discrepancies_ are looked upon as the whole of the case. But in point of fact they are not the whole of the case; for it is not less true that there are large portions of the _Iliad_, which present positive and undeniable evidences of _coherence_, 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.