"Our little systems have their day." "They have their day, and cease to be." The little system which explained the _Iliad_ as a mass, or rather a concatenation of short lays, "has had its day." The system of a primal "kernel" (Books i., xi., xvi., and so forth)--a kernel more archaic in language than Books ix., x., xxiii., xxiv.--is also perishing, "stricken through with doubt." The linguistic analysis of Miss Stawell (_Homer and the Iliad_, 1909) and, in America, of Professor Scott, has fatally damaged the linguistic tests of books for earliness and lateness. The most advanced German critics find that Book i. of the _Iliad_ is no longer that genuine kernel which, with certain other passages, represents the primal _Menis_, or "wrath of Achilles," as opposed to the later accretions of three or four centuries. _Das ist ausgespielt!_ The "kernel" hypothesis is doomed. Its cornerstone--Book i. of the _Iliad_, is, by the builders of new theories, rejected; it is now one of the latest additions to the _Iliad_.[1] Only to one point is criticism steadfast. The _Iliad must_ be a thing of rags and tatters; and it is torn up by the process of misstating its statements and finding "discrepancies" in the statements misstated. Again, as even Comparetti's "man-microscopes" could not well help seeing that the epics, though not good enough as compositions for them, still _are_ compositions; have, in a way, organic unity, harmony, adjusted relations of all the portions, some critics tried to account for the facts as the result of the labours of the Pisistratean, or Solonian, or Hipparchian Committee of Recension at Athens, in the sixth century B.C. But so many critics of all shades of opinion have rejected this hypothesis, even with scorn, as "a worthless fable," "an absurd legend," part of Homeric mythology (Blass, Meyer, Mr. T. W. Alien, D. B. Monro, Nutzhorn, Grote, and many others), that it can scarcely be restored even by the learned ingenuity of Mr. Verrall.[2] In defect of the late Recension, which is wholly destitute of historic evidence, a poet, a _Dichter_, has to be sought somewhere, and at some period of the supposed "evolution" of the _Iliad_. He may lawfully be sought, it seems, at any period of the history of the poem, except at the point where, in fact, the poet is always found, namely at the beginning. The search for the poet will never find him anywhere else. He cannot be made to fit into the eighth or seventh or sixth century; it is useless to look for him at the Court of Croesus! A poem purely Achaean had an Achaean author. None of the many critical keys fits the lock. The linguistic key breaks itself, it cannot break the wards.