Here we entirely side with Mr. Leaf. No poet, no painter, no sculptor, in a naif, uncritical age, ever represents in art anything but what he sees daily in costume, customs, weapons, armour, and ways of life. Mr. Leaf, however, on the other hand, occasionally chides pieces of deliberate archaeological pedantry in the poets, in spite of his opinion that they are always "depicting the circumstances by which they are surrounded." But as huge man-covering shields are _not_ among the circumstances by which the supposed late poets were surrounded, why do they depict them? Here Mr. Leaf corrects himself, and his argument departs from the statement that only one theory is "conceivable," namely, that the poets depict their own surroundings, and we are introduced to a new proposition. "Or rather we must recognise everywhere a compromise between two opposing principles: the singer, on the one hand, has to be conservatively tenacious of the old material which serves as the substance of his song; on the other hand, he has to be vivid and actual in the contributions which he himself makes to the common stock." [Footnote: _Ibid._, ix. pp. 463, 464.] The conduct of such singers is so weirdly inconsistent as not to be easily credible. But probably they went further, for "it is possible that the allusions" to the corslet "may have been introduced in the course of successive modernisation such as the oldest parts of the _Iliad_ seem in many cases to have passed through. But, in fact, _Iliad_, XI. 234 is the only mention of a corslet in any of the oldest strata, so far as we can distinguish them, and here Reichel translates _thorex_ 'shield.'" [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 578.] Mr. Leaf's statement we understand to mean that, when the singer or reciter was delivering an ANCIENT lay he did not introduce any of the military gear--light round bucklers, greaves, and corslets--with which his audience were familiar. But when the singer delivers a new lay, which he himself has added to "the kernel," then he is "vivid and actual," and speaks of greaves and corslets, though he still cleaves in his new lay to the obsolete chariot, the enormous shield, and, in an age of iron, to weapons of bronze. He is a sadly inconsistent new poet!