rather than that she had several men gifted with any such powers, and then forgot them.

Not all parts of Homeric poetry are of the same merit, and it is easy to pick out scenes in which there seems little energy and inspiration, but no three parts of these poems show such diversities as are shown by The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Hamlet, and A Midsummer-Night's Dream.

The observation has been made by competent critics that Homer has more sustained grandeur and less variation than Shakespeare.

It is probable that Homer had no rivals in his own age, and also that he had no predecessors who could have begun, as he had no followers who could have completed his poems. Such writers as Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Milton may have had associates, but the works on which their fame is based were not done in collaboration.

The French Chansons de Geste, with their numberless songs around a common heroic theme, seem to have all the necessary conditions for a great epic poem, all but the great epic poet himself. They probably represent much the same stage of poetry as would have been represented by early Greece in its songs

and epic cycle, if Homer had not been. The Ballads of Spain have been called "Iliads without Homer." It is just the one fact of Homer that gives glory to heroic Greece.5

In all the great ages of literature the outstanding achievements have been the work of single individuals and not of schools, groups, or masses of inspired and creative singers.

The plan and the workmanship of the Iliad and the Odyssey show that they were each conceived as a whole and were not the result of gradual or fortuitous additions. It is also evident that they have never been subjected to any serious or lasting revision and that no one ever had the power and the will to improve or to rewrite them."

Some simple proofs that Homer has never been subjected to serious revision are these: Pylaemenes was slain in the action of the fifth book of the Iliad, but he is alive to mourn the death of a son in the thirteenth book. This contradiction regarding a subordinate character would have seemed a trifle to the original poet, but would have been a serious matter to revisers, as it has been to all the critics, and had it been in the power of the revisers they would certainly have removed that contradic

tion. The change of a single word in the first passage or the addition of a negative in the second would have been all that was needed, but that slight revision was not made.

Odysseus in the presence of the Phaeacians boasted that he was the best archer of all the Greeks who fought at Troy; yet when the contest in archery was held in the Games of the Iliad, Odysseus did not even compete, although he had been a contestant in several events. Homer did not care about this discrepancy, as the hero was simply engaging in some epic boasting, but nervous revisers, without the fires of creative impulse, would have removed the difficulty by quietly substituting Odysseus for the winning archer in the story of the Iliad.

A like explanation must be given for the failure of the poet to mention at the death of Hector the fact that he was protected by the armor of Achilles, his slayer; also for the silence of the same poet regarding the treachery of Pandarus when he fell at the hands of Diomede.

Such passages as these in which the hearer is left to fill out the gaps and to draw his own inferences, as well as many other unrevised

inconsistencies,

"Homeric nods," furnish abundant evidence for the belief that the poetry of Homer has not been seriously revised or interpolated.

This evidence is confirmed by the wellknown conservatism of the Greeks, a conservatism which banished Onomacritus, a favorite of Pisistratus, for adding a verse to the poetry of the mythical Musaeus, and which fined Lycon, a friend of Alexander, the huge sum of ten talents for interpolating a single verse in an Attic comedy.

The Homeric poems could hardly have escaped linguistic weathering or modernization, also certain stock verses might have been added, others dropped or transposed, but with these minor exceptions it is probable that no change has been made in the text of Homer since its creation. It must be remembered that the language of Homer is unlike the dialect of any of the historical peoples of Greece and that the most remote Hellenic lands and cities all quoted him in his own speech, they did not transfer him to their own.

These two poems are much longer than the 27,853 verses might imply, and the frequent assertion that Spenser's Faerie Queene with its

35,000 verses is as long as the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid combined rests on a wrong inference. The verse used by Spenser has, except the last verse of the stanza, but ten syllables, while the shortest possible Homeric verse has twelve, the longest seventeen, and the average is between fifteen and sixteen. One hundred verses in Homer have as many syllables as one-hundred-fifty-five in Spenser; therefore the combined length of the Iliad and the Odyssey is much greater than that of the Faerie Queene. Bryant's translation of the Iliad into English pentapody has just under 20,000 verses.

In all these Homeric verses there is not a single gap, not one incomplete line, not a verse too long or too short, but all alike have the finished mark of the same artist.