superior strength_, considered every compromise as unworthy of them,—namely, to decide the war by a single combat between the authors of it.” Here the causality of Achilles is dragged in by main force, and unsupported either by any actual statement in the poem or by any reasonable presumption; for it is _the Trojans_ who propose the single combat, and we are not told that they had ever proposed it before, though they would have had stronger reasons for proposing it during the presence of Achilles than during his absence. O. Müller himself remarks (§ 7), “that from the second to the seventh book Zeus appears as it were to have forgotten his resolution and his promise to Thetis.” In other words, the poet, during this part of the poem, drops the point of view of the Achillêis to take up that of the more comprehensive Iliad: the Achillêis reappears in book viii,—again disappears in book x,—and is resumed from book xi. to the end of the poem. [301] This tendency to insert new homogeneous matter by new poets into poems already existing, is noticed by M. Fauriel, in reference to the _Romans_ of the Middle Ages:— “C’est un phénomène remarquable dans l’histoire de la poésie épique, que cette disposition, cette tendance constante du goût populaire à amalgamer, à lier en une seule et même composition le plus possible des compositions diverses,—cette disposition persiste chez un peuple, tant que la poésie conserve un reste de vie; tant qu’elle s’y transmet par la tradition et qu’elle y circule à l’aide du chant ou des récitations publiques. Elle cesse partout où la poésie est une fois fixée dans les livres, et n’agit plus que par la lecture,—cette dernière époque est pour ainsi dire, celle de la propriété poétique—celle où chaque poëte prétend à une existence, à une gloire, personnelles; et où la poésie cesse d’être une espèce de trésor commun dont le peuple jouit et dispose à sa manière, sans s’inquiéter des individus qui le lui ont fait.” (Fauriel, Sur les Romans Chevaleresques, leçon 5me, Revue des Deux Mondes, vol. xiii. p. 707.) M. Fauriel thinks that the Shah Nameh of Ferdusi was an amalgamation of epic poems originally separate, and that probably the Mahabharat was so also (_ib._ 708).