Taking as a text Mr. Monro's essay, _The Relation of the Odyssey to the Iliad_, [Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 324, _seqq_.] we examine the notes of difference which he finds between the twin Epics. As to the passages in which he discovers "borrowing or close imitation of passages" in the _Iliad_ by the poet of the _Odyssey_, we shall not dwell on the matter, because we know so little about the laws regulating the repetition of epic formulae. It is tempting, indeed, to criticise Mr. Monro's list of twenty-four Odyssean "borrowings," and we might arrive at some curious results. For example, we could show that the _Klothes_, the spinning women who "spae" the fate of each new-born child, are not later, but, as less abstract, are if anything earlier than "the simple _Aisa_ of the _Iliad_." [Footnote: _Odyssey_, VII. 197; _Iliad_, xx. 127.] But our proof would require an excursion into the beliefs of savage and barbaric peoples who have their _Klothes_, spae-women attending each birth, but who are not known to have developed the idea of _Aisa_ or Fate. We might also urge that "to send a spear through the back of a stag" is not, as Mr. Monro thought, "an improbable feat," and that a man wounded to death as Leiocritus was wounded, would not, as Mr. Monro argued, fall backwards. He supposes that the poet of the _Odyssey_ borrowed the forward fall from a passage in the _Iliad_, where the fall is in keeping. But, to make good our proof, it might be necessary to spear a human being in the same way as Leiocritus was speared. [Footnote: Monro, odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 239, 230.] The repetitions of the Epic, at all events, are not the result of the weakness of a poet who had to steal his expressions like a schoolboy. They have some other cause than the indolence or inefficiency of a _cento_--making undergraduate. Indeed, a poet who used the many terms in the _Odyssey_ which do not occur in the _Iliad_ was not constrained to borrow from any predecessor. It is needless to dwell on the Odyssean novelties in vocabulary, which were naturally employed by a poet who had to sing of peace, not of war, and whose epic, as Aristotle says, is "ethical," not military. The poet's rich vocabulary is appropriate to his novel subject, that is all. Coming to Religion (I) we find Mr. Leaf assigning to his original _Achilleis_--"the kernel"--the very same religious ideas as Mr. Monro takes to be marks of "lateness" and of advance when he finds them in the Odyssey!