Some advanced kinds of handicraft, such as the inlaying of metals, which have been brought to light in Mycenæan work, are specially prominent in the Homeric poems. It is hard to conceive the nucleus of the poems having originated elsewhere than in the country where Mycenæan grandeur was still fresh. The legend which brings the rude Dorians into Greece about 1100 B.C. (the date need not be so early) accounts for the disappearance of this splendour, and the migration of the Achæans with their poems to Asia Minor. So far Mr. Leaf agrees, as well as with the theory of Fick, that the earliest poems were composed, not in Ionic, but in the old dialect of Greece, which may be called Æolic, provided (he adds) we do not identify it with the late Æolic to which it has been reduced by Fick. It is added by Schuchardt that the great body of _Nostoi_ seems irreconcilable with E. Curtius' theory that the lays were composed for the early Æolic settlers, who made Asia Minor their permanent home; so that the Trojan War may really have been a mercantile war of Mycenæ against the Trojan pirates, who were outside the zone of the Mycenæan trade-route, but may have seriously injured it. Mr. Leaf justly points out that the obscure islands along this route, Cos, and Carpathus, together with Rhodes, in which Mycenæan wares have been found, are counted by the Homeric _Catalogue_ as Achæan allies of Mycenæ, while the (Carian) Cyclades, though much larger and perhaps more populated, are ignored. So far the case for the early date and historic basis of Homer seems considerably strengthened by recent research. Nevertheless, the marked contrasts between the Mycenæan Greeks and the society in Homer create a great difficulty. Some of these have been removed by the aid of (perhaps legitimate) ingenuity, but differences of dress, of burial customs, in the use of iron, &c., remain. The seafaring too of the Homeric Greeks does not seem to me at all what we may infer the Mycenæan seafaring to have been. Minos, or somebody else, must have suppressed piracy, and prehistoric trading cannot have been so exclusively in the hands of the Phœnicians. The Old Mycenæans were perfectly ignorant of the art of writing, a fact which seems to preclude any systematic dealing with the Phœnicians, though Busolt rather infers from it a want of personal intercourse with the Hittites, and a mere reception of Asiatic luxuries through rude and semi-hostile Sidonian adventurers. Busolt thinks we can follow down prehistoric art through its various steps to that which leads into the Homeric epoch, but as yet such a gradual transition seems to me not clearly shown; I cannot but feel a gulf between the two. Either therefore the original poets of the Iliad were separated by a considerable gap of time from the life they sought to describe--there may have been a period of decadence before the Dorians appeared--or the Ionic recension was far more trenchant than a mere matter of dialect,