Sir Richard's argument would have been logical if many efforts by many hands, in many ages, in England, Finland, Ireland, Iceland, and Germany did actually produce true parallels to the Achaean epics. They did not, and why not? Simply because these other races had no Homer. All the other necessary conditions were present, the legendary material, the heroic society, the Court minstrels, all--except the great poet. In all the countries mentioned, except Finland, there existed military aristocracies with their courts, castles, and minstrels, while the minstrels had rich material in legendary history and in myth, and _Maerchen_, and old songs. But none of the minstrels was adequate to the production of an English, German, or Irish _ILIAD_ or _ODYSSEY_, or even of a true artistic equivalent in France. We have tried to show that the critics, rejecting a Homer, have been unable to advance any adequate hypothesis to account for the existence of the _ILIAD_ and _ODYSSEY_. Now we see that, where such conditions of production as they postulate existed but where there was no great epic genius, they can find no true parallels to the Epics. Their logic thus breaks down at both ends. It may be replied that in non-Greek lands one condition found in Greek society failed: the succession of a reading age to an age of heroic listeners. But this is not so. In France and Germany an age of readers duly began, but they did not mainly read copies of the old heroic poems. They turned to lyric poetry, as in Greece, and they recast the heroic songs into modern and popular forms in verse and prose, when they took any notice of the old heroic poems at all. One merit of the Greek epics is a picture of "a certain phase of early civilisation," and that picture is "a naturally harmonious whole," with "unity of impression," says Sir Richard Jebb. [Footnote: Homer, p. 37.] Certainly we can find no true parallel, on an Homeric scale, to this "harmonious picture" in the epics of Germany and England or in the early literature of Ireland. Sir Richard, for England, omits notice of _Beowulf_; but we know that _Beowulf_, a long heroic poem, is a mass of anachronisms--a heathen legend in a Christian setting. The hero, that great heathen champion, has his epic filled full of Christian allusions and Christian morals, because the clerical redactor, in Christian England, could not but intrude these things into old pagan legends evolved by the continental ancestors of our race. He had no "painful anxiety," like the supposed Ionic continuators of the Achaean poems (when they are not said to have done precisely the reverse), to preserve harmony of ancient ideas. Such archaeological anxieties are purely modern.