In the first place, every reader of Homer is familiar with the fact that the poet constantly makes use, when occasion serves, of expressions, sentences, often even of complete passages, which have been already applied in a corresponding, or occasionally even in a wholly different relation. The same epithets are repeatedly applied to the same deity or hero. A long message is delivered in the very words which have been already used by the sender of the message. In one well-known instance (in Book II.), not only is a message delivered thus, but the person who has received it repeats it to others in precisely the same terms. In the combat between Hector and Ajax (Book VI.), the flight of Ajax’s spear and the movement by which Hector avoids the missile, are described in six lines, differing only as to proper names from those which had been already used in describing the encounter between Paris and Menelaus (Book III.). This peculiarity would be a decided blemish in a written poem. Tennyson, indeed, occasionally copies Homer’s manner—for instance, in ‘Enid,’ he twice repeats the line— As careful robins eye the delver’s toil;— but with a good taste which prevents the repetition from becoming offensive. The fact is, that the peculiarity marks Homer as the _singer_, not the _writer_, of poetry. I would not be understood as accepting the theory, according to which the ‘Iliad’ is a mere string of ballads. I imagine that no one who justly appreciates that noble poem would be willing to countenance such a theory. But that the whole poem was sung by Homer at those prolonged festivals which formed a characteristic peculiarity of Achaian manners seems shown, not only by what we learn respecting the later ‘rhapsodists,’ but by the internal evidence of the poem itself.[20] Homer, reciting a long and elaborate poem of his own composition, occasionally varying the order of events, or adding new episodes, extemporized as the song proceeded, would exhibit the peculiarity invariably observed in the ‘improvisatore,’ of using, more than once, expressions, sentences, or passages which happened to be conveniently applicable. The art of extemporizing depends on the capacity for composing fresh matter while the tongue is engaged in the recital of matter already composed. Anyone who has watched a clever improvisatore cannot fail to have noticed that, though gesture is aptly wedded to words, the thoughts are elsewhere. In the case, therefore, of an improvisatore, or even of a rhapsodist reciting from memory, the occasional recurrence of a well-worn form of words serves as a relief to the strained invention or memory. We have reason then for supposing that if Homer had, in his earlier days, composed a poem which was applicable, with slight alterations, to the story of the ‘Iliad,’ he would endeavour, by a suitable arrangement of the plan of his narrative, to introduce the lines whose recital had long since become familiar to him.