Mr. Verrall says: "We cannot but think that the ancient record about the origin of Homer suffers unfairly from certain prepossessions which all would disclaim, but which are more easily disclaimed than abandoned." For me, I frankly confess my own prepossessions, but consciousness of his bias is the safeguard of the historian; it compels him to make certain that he adds nothing to and takes nothing from what Mr. Verrall calls "the ancient record," and _I_ call "the various ancient legends." Mr. Verrall insists that "internal evidence about the history of a book, if not controlled by record, is liable to infinitely elastic interpretation." Certainly, but there is no possibility of "control by record" in the case of the history of the Homeric poems. No historian can agree with Mr. Verrall that "as a matter of record and apart from inference or hypothesis, this Homer of ours ... appears as an artificial product of scholarship, the result of a critical process."[12] It is he who insists on the technical term "record"; it is not pedantic, therefore, to reply that "record" there is none. By "record" Mr. Verrall seems to mean, as regards the "artificial product of scholarship," a statement of opinion made five centuries after the alleged events. The first testimony, or "record," cited by Mr. Verrall has nothing to say about our Homer as "an artificial product of scholarship." It deals merely with the legalised recitation of Homeric poetry, and of that poetry alone, at the Panathenaea. The text is that which Mr. Monro calls "the earliest evidence," "that of the orators Lycurgus and Isocrates," in the fourth century. That is good evidence. Lycurgus could not speak to the Athenians of a law which, to their knowledge, did not exist. Lycurgus, in fact, had been cajoling his Athenian audience with a set of fables about their ancestors, whose patriotism and valour in _pre-Homeric times_ he applauds. Did not Erechtheus in a war with Thrace sacrifice his own daughter in obedience to an oracle, and then defeat the invaders! For this noble action Lycurgus cites a play by Euripides, _The Erechtheus_! Lycurgus next says that Athens made a law that the poems of Homer alone should be recited at the Panathenaea; and that, encouraged by the patriotism ascribed by the poet to Hector, the Athenians, in the Persian affair, were ready to die, not for their city only, but for all Hellas. Such men were the Athenians, in public and private life: then comes the story of the Spartans borrowing Tyrtaeus from Athens, and their approval of a Tyrtaean poem adapted in part from _Iliad_, xxii. 71 ff.