Agreeing with my honoured friend in what I have italicised above, I think it is time that the Homeric question were set at rest, and, to atone for our error in shaking the vase, let it remain at peace forever. I offer my reflections on the subject with extreme diffidence, yet, though I confess myself open to correction, and desirous of it, as a friend to literature, I cannot say that I think my views will be found far from an approximation to the truth, which, at this remote age, is all we can possibly arrive at. As Plinius Secundus held that there was no book so bad but that something might be learned from it, so I hold that there is no theory so bad (always excepting that one put forth by some escaped Bedlamite, of Shakspeare's non-being, and that his works were the composition of the monks), but that there lies some truth at the bottom of it. On that principle I have endeavoured "to lay the keel" (as Southey used to say of his planned poems) of a reconciliation between all the beliefs of all the theorists. I will state my theory, as I have done the others, in the plainest possible terms; and, to begin at the beginning, I must go back to the origin of song. Is it possible that an army like that of the Hellenes when at Troy, had no idea of passing the weary evenings except in drinking and talking? No: surely not. We find Phemios singing, in the _Odyssea_, lays of much the same kidney as those in Athenæos, and in Xenophon's _Symposion_. These were short recitals of some particular circumstance of antiquity, half religious and half earthly. No doubt the common soldiers of that age had, like the common sailors of some fifty years ago, some one qualified to "discourse in excellent music" among them. Many of these, like those of the negroes in the United States, were extemporaneous, and allusive to events passing around them. But what was passing around them? The grand events of a spirit-stirring war; occurrences likely to impress themselves, as the mystical legends of former times had done, upon their memory; besides which, a retentive memory was deemed a virtue of the first water, and was cultivated accordingly, in those ancient times. Ballads at first, and down to the beginning of the war with Troy, were mere recitations with an intonation. Then followed a species of recitative, probably with an intoned burden. Tune next followed, as it aided the memory considerably.