Lachmann's theory of separate authorship of portions of the poem has not maintained itself against the critics. That there are contradictions in its statements and different values in its parts cannot be denied, but they are not explained on the grounds here set forth. The attempted restoration of the poem by elimination and rearrangement has not left twenty or any number of lays that have actually the air of being separate poems. "It is just here," continues Lettsom, "that the failure of the hypothesis is most conspicuous.... Some of the lays are not ill-adapted, from the nature of their contents, to form separate poems, but they are by no means out of place as episodes in a long work, and are, besides, connected with the rest, while the latter, from the insignificance of their contents alone, from their reference to one another, from their allusions to the past and anticipations of the future, from their abrupt commencements and still more abrupt conclusions, and from their general fragmentary nature, could never have been independent lays.... The dream of Kriemhild forms a strange opening for a lay that just brings Siegfried to Worms, and there leaves him. Nobody, in fact, would have composed a separate poem on so insignificant a matter. The dream, however, is beyond all doubt the introduction, the fit and appropriate introduction, to a poem that must go on at least to the marriage of Kriemhild and the death of her husband. "Professor Lachmann himself seems to be in doubt whether this First Lay be complete; he talks of 'this lay, or what has been preserved of it;' he tells us that 'it several times indicates a continuation, and might have deserved a better than that which follows;' but though he expresses a doubt, he gives no reasons for entertaining one. It certainly would require far less ingenuity to assign cogent reasons for a doubt, and indeed for much more than a doubt, on this point; the lay, as it stands, is a 'passage that leads to nothing,' a mountain in labor that does not produce even so much as a mouse; but it is not singular in this respect; its brethren for the most part keep it in countenance; or, if they contain matter of interest, they too often try the temper of the reader by disappointing his expectations at the most critical moment, and coming to an abrupt conclusion in the midst of an action. Thus the Eighteenth Lay ends just after the battle between Huns and Burgundians has begun; the Nineteenth stops short just at the moment when Etzel has brought up 20,000 fresh men and commenced another attack on Gunther and his followers.