And Hermann observes justly, in his acute treatise De Interpolationibus Homeri (Opuscula, tom. v. p. 53),—“Nisi admirabilis illa Homericorum carminum suavitas lectorum animos quasi incantationibus quibusdam captos teneret, non tam facile delitescerent, quæ accuratius considerata, et multo minus apte quam quis jure postulet composita esse apparere necesse est.” This treatise contains many criticisms on the structure of the Iliad, some of them very well founded, though there are many from which I dissent. [285] In reference to the books from the second to the seventh, inclusive, I agree with the observations of William Müller, Homerische Vorschule, Abschnitt viii. pp. 116-118. If we take those portions of the poem which I imagine to have constituted the original Achillêis, it will be found that the sequence of events contained in them is more rapid, more unbroken, and more intimately knit together in the way of cause and effect, than in the other books. Heyne and Lachmann, indeed, with other objecting critics, complains of the action in them as being too much crowded and hurried, since one day lasts from the beginning of the eleventh book to the middle of the eighteenth, without any sensible halt in the march throughout so large a portion of the journey. Lachmann, likewise, admits that those separate songs, into which he imagines that the whole Iliad may be dissected, cannot be severed with the same sharpness, in the books subsequent to the eleventh, as in those before it.[286] There is only one real halting-place from the eleventh book to the twenty-second,—the death of Patroclus; and this can never be conceived as the end of a separate poem,[287] though it is a capital step in the development of the Achillêis, and brings about that entire revolution in the temper of Achilles which was essential for the purpose of the poet. It would be a mistake to imagine that there ever could have existed a separate poem called Patrocleia, though a part of the Iliad was designated by that name. For Patroclus has no substantive position: he is the attached friend and second of Achilles, but nothing else,—standing to the latter in a relation of dependence resembling that of Telemachus to Odysseus. And the way in which Patroclus is dealt with in the Iliad, is, (in my judgment,) the most dexterous and artistical contrivance in the poem,—that which approaches nearest to the neat tissue of the Odyssey.[288] [286] Lachmann, Fernere Betrachtungen über die Ilias, Abhandlungen Berlin. Acad. 1841, p. 4.