A yet more scandalous discrepancy in the _Iliad_ remains to be noticed. "It is a contradiction," says Mr. Leaf with manly indignation, "at the very root of the story, as flagrant as if Shakespeare had forgotten in the Fifth Act of _Macbeth_ that Duncan had been murdered in the second."[7] If Shakespeare had made that error, and, like Fielding, had told his manager that the public would never notice it; like Fielding, when he heard the hisses and catcalls, he would probably have murmured, "Damn them, they _have_ found it out!" But though Homer's error was as flagrant as the suggested resuscitation of the gracious Duncan, for three thousand years nobody "found it out." It was discovered by Mr. Grote, an excellent banker, but no great poetical critic; and by a German who, in search of discrepancies, had been "nosing the body" of Homer "with passionate attention." Now an error cannot be blazingly flagrant, nor vociferously crying, if it escapes a hundred generations of hearers, readers, Pisistratean "recensors," and Alexandrian and modern Editors. Moreover, if the Greek recensors laboured to harmonise old and new by skilfully interwoven cross-references (and the critics tell us that they did), "how," as Miss Stawell asks, "did it ever happen that the gross blots were allowed to enter or remain?" That _this_ blunder was allowed to remain, unnoted and unrebuked, till about 1840 A.D., proves beyond contradiction that, at least, it is not "flagrant"; does not resemble the appearance of Duncan in Act V. of _Macbeth_, when "after life's fitful fever he sleeps well," in Act III. Mr. Leaf only shows us how far a passion for discovering discrepancies, if not early checked, may hurry the learned. Again, if Homer's blunder were as glaring as the forgetfulness by the author of _Macbeth_ that Duncan had been murdered, it is unlikely that, by "Bergk, Hentze, Monro, and Lang," to quote Mr. Leaf, Homer would be pronounced innocent.[8] We have "weakened some of the chief arguments stated by Grote," that is admitted, "yet their general force is unshaken." How this can possibly be, if Grote's chief arguments are sensibly weakened, does not appear; for the general force must be shaken when some of the chief arguments which make up that force are impaired. Grote's chief argument is that the poet who composed Books xi.-xvi. "could not have had present to his mind the main event of the ninth Book,--the out-pouring of profound humiliation by the Greeks, and from Agamemnon specially, before Achilles, coupled with formal offers to restore Briseis, and pay the amplest compensation for past wrong. The words of Achilles (not less than those of Patroclus and Nestor), in the eleventh and the following Books, plainly imply that the humiliation of the Greeks before him, for which he thirsts, is as yet future and contingent."[9]