Now no mortal can assert that when a poet mentions the gate, he mentions nothing but the fosse! Both fosse and gates are _new_: the gates are a necessary part of the wall; and only a critic on the search for a discrepancy could overlook the fact that the poet of Book x. knows all about the fortification of Books vii. viii. ix. The poet has no occasion to say "the gates _in the wall_"; the gates could be nowhere else. Had there been a wall with no gates, which is absurd, the poet would have had to make the princes scale the wall; and, had he known nothing about the new fortification, he could not have mentioned the new gates and the new fosse. I repeat, in ix. 65, 88, Nestor bids the advanced post take position; and they do so, "betwixt fosse and wall"; and there, "before the gate" (x. 126, 127), Agamemnon expects to find them. The "discrepancy" is due to Mr. Verrall's imagination. Before accusing Homer of extraordinary discrepancies, we ought to read him with ordinary care. Knowing the new fosse, and the new gate, both of them unheard of before Book vii., the poet is beyond doubt acquainted with the whole of the new fortification. "The analytic reader," for whom Homer did not sing, catches him at another place. How did Dolon expect to creep among the host, when there was a wall? How was he to enter? We can only reply that if he found the advanced post drowsy, he must enter in the darkness, by climbing up "where the wall was built lowest." The host was suspected to be meditating flight, and, in their confusion, _keeping no guard_, so Hector fancied (x. 310-312).