machinery generally works in an ill-regulated and haphazard fashion. Moreover, the embassy of conciliation in the Ninth Book is ignored later on; while the Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Books, devoted mainly to the obsequies of Patroclus and Hector, have by some critics been deemed superfluous, by others inconsistent with an exordium announcing—as Pope has it— The wrath that hurled to Pluto’s gloomy reign The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain, Whose limbs unburied by the naked shore, Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore. Through the weight of these objections, Mr. Grote felt compelled to dissever the Iliad into a primitive part, which he called the Achilleid, and a mass of accessional poetry, most likely of diverse origin and date. And a similar view still prevails. Only that the Achilleid has been cut down, by further retrenchments, to the compass of a somewhat prolix Lay, treating, as its express subject, of the ‘Wrath’ of Achilles. Dr. Leaf indeed accentuates the separation by upholding the probable origin, on opposite sides of the Ægean, of the nuclear and adventitious portions of the Epic. The force of some of the arguments urging to this analysis cannot be denied, yet there are others, perhaps of a higher order of importance, which indicate the former predominance of a partially destroyed entirety of design through by far the larger portion of this wonderful prehistoric work. Speaking broadly, an identical spirit pervades the whole. The Tenth Book, and a few notoriously interpolated passages, such as the feeble and futile Theomachy, make the sole exceptions to this rule of ethical homogeneity. Elsewhere, from beginning to end, we meet the same spontaneous fervour of expression, the same magnificent energy kept in hand like a spirited steed; an unfailing sense of the splendour of heroic achievement, and a glowing joy in human existence, tempered by the heart-thrilling remembrance of its pathetic mystery of sorrow. This prevalent uniformity in manner and spirit is certainly unfavourable to the hypothesis of divided authorship. The marvellous beauty and power of those sections of the poem believed to be adventitious is also a circumstance to be considered. They include many of its most famous scenes—the parting of Hector and Andromache, the arming of Athene, the meeting of Glaucus and Diomed, and the whole vivid interlude of Diomed’s prowess, the orations in the tent of Achilles, the chariot-race, the reception of Priam as his suppliant by the fierce slayer of his son. To them exclusively, above all, belongs the personal presentation of Helen; outside their limits, she has no place in the Iliad.