"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 poetry: First comes the age of short narrative songs; next, when these have become numerous, there arise constructive minds who re-cast and blend together many of them into a larger aggregate, conceived upon some scheme of their own. The age of the epos is followed by that of the epopee: short spontaneous effusions prepare the way, and furnish materials for the architectonic genius of the poet. It is farther presumed by the above-mentioned authors that the pre-Homeric epic included a great abundance of such smaller songs--a fact which admits of no proof, but which seems countenanced by some passages in Homer, and is in itself no way improbable. But the transition from such songs, assuming them to be ever so numerous, to a combined and continuous poem, forms an epoch in the intellectual history of a nation, implying mental qualities of a higher order than those upon which the songs themselves depend. Nor is it at all to be imagined that the materials pass unaltered from their first state of combination: they must of necessity be re-cast, and undergo an adapting process, in which the genius of the organising poet consists; and we cannot hope, by simply knowing them as they exist in the second stage, ever to divine how they stood in the first. Such, in my judgment, is the right conception of the Homeric epoch--an organising poetical mind, still preserving that freshness of observation and vivacity of details which constitutes the charm of the ballad.