The two heroes then refresh themselves; breakfast, in fact, and drink, as is natural. By this time the dawn must have been in the sky, and in Book XI. men are stirring with the dawn. Such is the story of Book X. The reader may decide as to whether it is "_Very_ late; barely Homeric," or a late and deliberate piece of burlesque, [Footnote: Henry, _Classical Review_. March 1906.] or whether it is very Homeric, though the whole set of situations--a night of terror, an anxious chief, a nocturnal adventure--are unexampled in the poem. The poet's audience of warriors must have been familiar with such situations, and must have appreciated the humorous, ruthless treatment of Dolon, the spoiled only brother of five sisters. Mr. Monro admitted that Dolon is Shakespearian, but added, "too Shakespearian for Homer." One may as well say that Agincourt, in Henry V., is "too Homeric for Shakespeare." Mr. Monro argued that "the Tenth Book comes in awkwardly after the Ninth." Nitzsche thinks just the reverse. The patriotic warrior audience would delight in the _Doloneia_ after the anguish of Book IX.; would laugh with Odysseus at the close of his adventure, and rejoice with the other Achaeans (X. 505). "The introductory part of the Book is cumbrous," says Mr. Monro. To us it is, if we wish to get straight to the adventure, just as the customary delays in Book XIX., before Achilles is allowed to fight, are tedious to us. But the poet's audience did not necessarily share our tastes, and might take pleasure (as I do) in the curious details of the opening of Book X. The poet was thinking of his audience, not of modern professors. "We hear no more of Rhesus and his Thracians." Of Rhesus there was no more to hear, and his people probably went home, like Glenbuckie's Stewarts after the mysterious death of their chief in Amprior's house of Leny before Prestonpans (1745). Glenbuckie was mysteriously pistolled in the night. "The style and tone is unlike that of the Iliad ... It is rather akin to comedy of a rough farcical kind." But it was time for "comic relief." If the story of Dolon be comic, it is comic with the practical humour of the sagas. In an isolated nocturnal adventure and massacre we cannot expect the style of an heroic battle under the sunlight. Is the poet not to be allowed to be various, and is the scene of the Porter in _Macbeth_, "in style and tone," like the rest of the drama? (_Macbeth_, Act ii. sc. 3). Here, of course, Shakespeare indulges infinitely more in "comedy of a rough practical kind" than does the author of the _Doloneia_.