The general result of a study of the Odyssey may be set down as follows: 1. The poem, as it now stands, exhibits unequivocally adaptation of parts and continuity of structure, whether by one or by several consentient hands: it may, perhaps, be a secondary formation, out of a preëxisting Odyssey of smaller dimensions; but, if so, the parts of the smaller whole must have been so far recast as to make them suitable members of the larger, and are noway recognizable by us. 2. The subject-matter of the poem not only does not favor, but goes far to exclude, the possibility of the Wolfian hypothesis. Its events cannot be so arranged as to have composed several antecedent substantive epics, afterwards put together into the present aggregate. Its authors cannot have been mere compilers of preëxisting materials, such as Peisistratus and his friends: they must have been poets, competent to work such matter as they found, into a new and enlarged design of their own. Nor can the age in which this long poem, of so many thousand lines, was turned out as a continuous aggregate, be separated from the ancient, productive, inspired age of Grecian epic. Arriving at such conclusions from the internal evidence of the Odyssey,[280] we can apply them by analogy to the Iliad. We learn something respecting the character and capacities of that early age which has left no other mementos except these two poems. Long continuous epics (it is observed by those who support the views of Wolf), with an artistical structure, are inconsistent with the capacities of a rude and non-writing age. Such epics (we may reply) are _not inconsistent_ with the early age of the Greeks, and the Odyssey is a proof of it; for in that poem the integration of the whole, and the composition of the parts, must have been simultaneous. The analogy of the Odyssey enables us to rebut that preconception under which many ingenious critics sit down to the study of the Iliad, and which induces them to explain all the incoherences of the latter by breaking it up into smaller unities, as if short epics were the only manifestation of poetical power which the age admitted. There ought to be no reluctance in admitting a presiding scheme and premeditated unity of parts, in so far as the parts themselves point to such a conclusion. [280] Wolf admits, in most unequivocal language, the compact and artful structure of the Odyssey. Against this positive internal evidence, he sets the general presumption, that no such constructive art can possibly have belonged to a poet of the age of Homer: “De Odysseâ maxime, cujus admirabilis summa et compages pro præclarissimo monumento Græci ingenii habenda est.... Unde fit ut Odysseam nemo, cui omnino priscus vates placeat, nisi perlectam e manu deponere queat. At illa ars id ipsum est, quod _vix ac ne vix quidem cadere_ videtur in vatem, singulas tantum rhapsodias decantantem,” etc. (Prolegomen. pp. cxviii-cxx; compare cxii.)