And here a brief reference must be made to the scepticism in miniature which has replaced the more sweeping incredulity of Wolf and his school. Editors of great weight, refusing to accompany even the Chorizontes in separating the authorship of the poems, nevertheless freely condemn particular passages. I do not deny that there are various passages, of which the genuineness is fair matter for discussion. But I confess that I find such grounds of excision, as those commonly alleged by critics recommending it, very indeterminate, and of a nature to leave it doubtful where their operation is to stop. They generally involve arbitrary assumptions either of construction or of history, or the application of a more rigid and literal rule of consistency than poetry either requires or can endure, or else the capital error, as I cannot but consider it, of bringing Homer to be tried at the bar of later and inferior traditions. And there is a want of common principles, a general insecurity of standing ground, and an appearance of reforming Homer not according to any acknowledged laws of criticism, but according to the humour of each accomplished and ingenious man: which, in a matter of this weight, is no sufficient guarantee. I therefore follow in the line of those, whose recommendation is to draw every thing we can out of the present text; and to see how far its contents may constitute a substantive and consistent whole, in the various branches of information to which they refer. When we have carried this process as far as it will bear, we may find, first that many or some of the seeming discordancies are really embraced within a comprehensive general harmony, and secondly that with a fuller knowledge of the laws of that harmony we may ourselves be in a condition at least of less incapacity to pronounce what is Homeric and what is not. I will only say that were I to venture into this field of criticism, I should be governed less than is usual by discrepancies of fact often very hastily assumed; and much more than is usual by any violence done to the finer analogies of which Homer is so full, and by departures from his regular modes of thought, feeling, and representation. FOOTNOTES: [42] Il. vi. 445-64; xii. 10-33; xv. 384. [43] Heyne, Exc. ii. ad Il. Ω. sect. ii., vol. viii. p. 789; Lord Aberdeen’s Inquiry, p. 65. [44] In the Berlin Philosophical Transactions, 1839, and Fernere Betrachtungen, 1843. [45] Pindar. [46] Exc. ii. ad Il. Ω, sect. ii. vol. viii. pp. 790, 1. [47] Exc. ii. ad Il. Ω, sect. ii. vol. viii. pp. 790, 1. [48] Pind. Nem. ii. 1. [49] Joseph. contr. Ap. i. 2. [50] Var. Hist. xiii. 14. [51] Plut. Lyc. p. 41. [52] Plat. Rep. x. p. 600, B. [53] Strabo xiv. p. 946. [54] viii. 2. [55] Herod. v. 67. [56] Hist. Greece, ii. 174 n. [57] Il. v. 412-15. [58] Il. ii. 572. [59] Heyne, Hom. viii., seq. [60] I. 57. [61] In Leocritum, 104-8. [62] Smith’s Dict. ‘Tyrtæus.’ [63] See the Homerus of Archdeacon Williams, pp. 9-11.