172 fflSTORY OF GREECE. power which the age admitted. There ought to be no reluctance in admitting a presiding scheme and premeditated unity of parts, in so far as the parts themselves point to such a conclusion. That the Iliad is not so essentially one piece as the Odyssey, every man agrees. It includes a much greater multiplicity of events, and what is yet more important, a greater multiplicity of prominent personages : the very indefinite title which it bears, as contrasted with the speciality of the name, Odyssey, marks the difference at once. The parts stand out more conspicuously from the whole, and admit more readily of being felt and appre- ciated in detached recitation. We may also add, that it is of more unequal execution than the Odyssey, often rising to a far higher pitch of grandeur, but also, occasionally, tamer : the story does not move on continuously ; incidents occur without plausible motive, nor can we shut our eyes to evidences of incoherence and contradiction. To a certain extent, the Iliad is open to all these remarks, though Wolf and William Miiller, and above all Lachmann, ex- aggerate the case in degree. And from hence has been deduced the hypothesis which treats the parts in their original state as separate integers, independent of, and unconnected with, each other, and forced into unity only by the afterthought of a subse- quent age ; or sometimes, not even themselves as integers, but as aggregates grouped together out of fragments still smaller,^ short epics formed by the coalescence of still shorter songs. Now there is some plausibility in these reasonings, so long as the discrepancies are looked upon as the whole of the case. But in point of fact they are not the whole of the case : for it is not less true, that there are large portions of the Iliad which present positive and undeniable evidences of coherence as antecedent and consequent, though we are occasionally perplexed by incon- sistencies of detail. To deal with these latter, is a portion of the duties of the critic. But he is not to treat the Iliad as if inconsistency prevailed everywhere throughout its parts-; for coherence of parts symmetrical antecedence and consequence is discernible throughout the larger half of the poem. Now the Wolfian theory explains the gaps and contradictions throughout the narrative, but it explains nothing else. If (as Lacbmann thinks) the Iliad originally consisted of sixteen songs/
