The brief narrative cut out of the mass by Mr. Leaf, then, was the genuine old original poem or "kernel." What we commonly call the _ILIAD_, on the other hand, is, by his theory, a thing of shreds and patches, combined in a manner to be later described. The blend, we learn, has none of the masterly unity of the old original poem. Meanwhile, as criticism of literary composition is a purely literary question, critics who differ from Mr. Leaf have a right to hold that the _Iliad_ as it stands contains, and always did contain, a plot of masterly perfection. We need not attend here so closely to Mr. Leaf's theory in the matter of the First Expansions, (2) and the Second Expansions, (3) but the latest Expansions (4) give the account of _The EMBASSY_ to _Achilles_ with his refusal of _Agamemnon's APOLOGY_(Book IX.), the [blank space] (Book XXIV.), the _RECONCILIATION OF ACHILLES AND Agamemnon, AND the FUNERAL Games_ of _Patroclus_ (XXIII.). In all these parts of the poem there are, we learn, countless alterations, additions, and expansions, with, last of all, many transitional passages, "the work of the editor inspired by the statesman," that is, of an hypothetical editor who really by the theory made our _ILIAD_, being employed to that end by Pistratus about 540 B.C. [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. ii. pp. x., xiv. 1900.]. Mr. Leaf and critics who take his general view are enabled to detect the patches and tatters of many ages by various tests, for example, by discovering discrepancies in the narrative, such as in their opinion no one sane poet could make. Other proofs of multiplex authorship are discovered by the critic's private sense of what the poem ought to be, by his instinctive knowledge of style, by detection of the poet's supposed errors in geography, by modernisms and false archaisms in words and grammar, and by the presence of many objects, especially weapons and armour, which the critic believes to have been unknown to the original minstrel. Thus criticism can pick out the things old, fairly old, late, and quite recent, from the mass, evolved through many centuries, which is called the _Iliad_.