was ever employed to form a standard text of the Epic or any portion of it.... At best there was a continuous tradition of those portions of the poems which were especially popular ..." [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. pp. xvi., xvii.] Father Browne dates the employment of writing for the preservation of the Epic "from the sixth century onwards." [Footnote: _Handbook of Homeric Study_, p. 134.] He also says that "it is difficult to suppose that the Mycenaeans, who were certainly in contact with this form of writing" (the Cretan linear), "should not have used it much more freely than our direct evidence warrants us in asserting." He then mentions the Knossian cup "with writing inscribed on it apparently in pen and ink ... The conclusion is that ordinary writing was in use, but that the materials, probably palm leaves, have disappeared." [Footnote: _Ibid_., pp. 258, 259.] Why it should be unlikely that a people confessedly familiar with writing used it for the preservation of literature, when we know that even the Red Indians preserve their songs by means of pictographs, while West African tribes use incised characters, is certainly not obvious. Many sorts of prae-Phoenician writing were current during the Mycenaean age in Asia, Egypt, Assyria, and in Cyprus. As these other peoples used writing of their own sort for literary purposes, it is not easy to see why the Cretans, for example, should not have done the same thing. Indeed, Father Browne supposes that the Mycenaeans used "ordinary writing," and used it freely. Nevertheless, the Epic was not written, he says, till the sixth century B.C. Cauer, indeed, remarks that "the Finnish epic" existed unwritten till Lbnnrot, its Pisistratus, first collected it from oral recitation. [Footnote: _Grundfragen der Homerkritik_, p. 94.] But there is not, and never was, any "Finnish epic." There were cosmogonic songs, as among the Maoris and Zunis--songs of the beginnings of things; there were magical songs, songs of weddings, a song based on the same popular tale that underlies the legend of the Argonauts. There were songs of the Culture Hero, songs of burial and feast, and of labour. Loennrot collected these, and tried by interpolations to make an epic out of them; but the point, as Comparetti has proved, is that he failed. There is no Finnish epic, only a mass of _Volkslieder._ Cauer's other argument, that the German popular tales, Grimm's tales, were unwritten till 1812, is as remote from the point at issue. Nothing can be less like an epic than a volume of _Maerchen._ As usual we are driven back upon a literary judgment. Is the _Iliad_ a patchwork of metrical _Maerchen_ or is it an epic nobly constructed? If it is the former, writing was not needed; if it is the latter, in the absence of Homeric guilds or colleges, only writing can account for its preservation.