he precisely coincides with his own decades. Yet I believe he does this not from any sense of the necessity of such coincidence, but because in that incomparable passage he had the extreme old age of a dog to represent, and to this the expression of the twentieth year was suited. When, however, we come to the case of Neoptolemus, we find this to be one extremely difficult of adjustment for any critic, who would insist upon a merely numerical precision in Homer. We must indeed dismiss from our minds the tales about the concealment of a beardless Achilles at Scyros, under a female disguise; from which he was extracted by the art of Ulysses. Of these stories Homer knows nothing; though it seems probable that the grace and beauty of the great warrior, as he stands in Homer, may have been connected with, or may have suggested, them. But what the Poet does represent is, that Achilles went to Troy when without experience in war, that he was put under a certain tutelage of Phœnix his original teacher, and now one of his lieutenants, that Patroclus as his senior was desired by Peleus to give him good advice, and that he is called νήπιος[835]. Yet his son Neoptolemus succeeds him in command before the close of the war, and attains to very high distinction. It is yet more needful to be observed, that his distinction is in council, as well as in the field[836]. The age of Achilles is, indeed, presumably somewhat raised by the fact, that Phœnix seems to represent himself as a good deal younger than Peleus, who, he says, treated him as a father might have done[837]. And again, Achilles is never represented as a young man in the Iliad, while Diomed is so represented. Still there is a decided incompatibility in the statements as to Achilles and his son, if we suppose that Homer carried in his mind the effect of his three decades, as determining precisely the growth of Neoptolemus in years and strength; for Neoptolemus is more advanced at the end of the war, than his illustrious father had been at its beginning. Mure has been at the pains[838] to arrange all these matters which depend on the decades chronologically, without, I think, removing the impression that mere chronology is considerably strained by them, and that if strictly judged, the narrative is, to all appearance, chargeable with some few years of maladjustment. It seems to me more near the truth to consider the three decades, together making up a γενεὴ, as a distribution of time which the Poet adopted for its symmetry and grandeur, since it represented the war as absorbing an age or generation of men: but not to hold him bound to adjust the relations of all the events he narrates with reference to a minute regularity of progression, which he seems not to have taken into account, and which his hearers were probably quite incapable of appreciating. If we wish to test his historical credit, we may try him by his own scheme of chronology, namely, his genealogies.