In the original oldest part of the _Iliad_, says Mr. Leaf, "the gods show themselves just so much as to let us know what are the powers which control mankind from heaven.... Their interference is such as becomes the rulers of the world, not partisans in the battle." [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. ii. pp. xii., xiii.] It is the later poets of the _Iliad_, in Mr. Leaf's view, who introduce the meddlesome, undignified, and extremely unsportsmanlike gods. The original early poet of the _Iliad_ had the nobler religious conceptions. In that case--the _Odyssey_ being later than the original kernel of the Iliad--the _Odyssey_ ought to give us gods as undignified and unworthy as those exhibited by the later continuators of the _Iliad_. But the reverse is the case. The gods behave fairly well in Book XXIV. of the _Iliad_, which, we are to believe, is the latest, or nearly the latest, portion. They are all wroth with the abominable behaviour of Achilles to dead Hector (XXIV. 134). They console and protect Priam. As for the _Odyssey_, Mr. Monro finds that in this late Epic the gods are just what Mr. Leaf proclaims them to have been in his old original kernel. "There is now an Olympian concert that carries on something like a moral government of the world. It is very different in the _Iliad_...." [Footnote: Monro, _Odyssey_, ii. 335.] But it was not very different; it was just the same, in Mr. Leaf's genuine old original germ of the _Iliad_. In fact, the gods are "very much like you and me." When their _ichor_ is up, they misbehave as we do when our blood is up, during the fury of war. When Hector is dead and when the war is over, the gods give play to their higher nature, as men do. There is no difference of religious conception to sever the _Odyssey_ from the later but not from the original parts of the _Iliad_. It is all an affair of the circumstances in each case.