Now a _book_ is one thing--a book with a name, such as _Cypria_, is not equivalent to "a mass of tradition," which is another thing. To take an example, we have _The Wallace_ of Blind Harry (_circ_. 1460), a book about as long as the _Odyssey_. Harry's materials were "a mass of tradition," including, it is believed, popular ballads, concerning events then remote by a century and a half. We cannot call the mass of tradition "a _book_ which was growing up"; nor can we call the mass of tradition about the Graeco-Trojan affairs before the tenth year of the siege, _a book_. There is no _book_ till the _Cypria_ is made, and the _Cypria_ cannot be borrowed from before it is made. A poet who relies on the _mass of tradition_ is not borrowing from a _book,_ any more than Harry was borrowing from a book (his use of an alleged book by Wallace's chaplain, John Blair, is another question). Manifestly incidents from a mass of tradition about Thebes, about the Greek and Trojan affairs before the war, and so on, may be introduced into an epic about the actual siege of Troy. That is all very natural and probable. But if a poem, with a definite name and a definite scope, the _Iliad_, borrow passages from another poem with a definite scope and name, the _Cypria_ or others, then the poem that lends is the earlier, and the poem that borrows is the later. It was the use by Mr. Murray of these definite names of poems, _Cypria, Little Iliad, Aethiopis_, and so on, with his assertion that another book, the _Iliad_, borrows passages from them, which led me to suppose that the lending poems were, in his opinion, _complete_ (in one form or another) when the _Iliad_ borrowed from them. Here I misinterpreted him. Had Mr. Murray written: "Other passages," in the _Iliad_, "seem to be derived from the masses of tradition about matters previous to and later than the opening and end of the _Iliad_--masses of tradition which in time became the topics of the _Cypria_, the _Little Iliad_, the _Aethiopis_," then I should have understood and agreed with him. The true view of the case, Mr. Murray's own view, seems to be this: there might be actual Greek books (probably not definitely _named_ till a later age), and these books might, like the _Chanson de Roland_, be _remaniés_; might be modernised, and might receive additions; and another book, that which we call the _Iliad_, might exist, and, like the _Chanson de Roland_ (in the _Roncevaux_ poem) might receive additions, the facts, in some cases, being taken from the other books, which were undergoing similar vicissitudes. This is not my own view of what occurred, but it is a thinkable state of things, and I regret that I did not understand Mr. Murray's position.