of the telegraph or telephone." [Footnote: _Op. cit._, p.
142.] "A writer of our own day,"--there is the pervading fallacy!
It is only writers of the last century who practise this
archaeological refinement. The authors of _Beowulf_ and the
_Nibelungenlied_, of the Chansons de _Geste_ and of the
Arthurian romances, always describe their antique heroes and the
details of their life in conformity with the customs, costume, and
armour of their own much later ages.

But Mr. Leaf, to take another instance, remarks as to the lack of
the metal lead in the Epics, that it is mentioned in similes only,
as though the poet were aware the metal was unknown in the heroic
age. [Footnote: _Iliad_, Note on, xi. 237.] Here the poet is
assumed to be a careful but ill-informed archaeologist, who wishes
to give an accurate representation of the past. Lead, in fact, was
perfectly familiar to the Mycenaean prime. [Footnote: Tsountas and
Manatt, p. 73.] The critical usage of supposing that the ancients
were like the most recent moderns--in their archaeological
preoccupations--is a survival of the uncritical habit which
invariably beset old poets and artists. Ancient poets, of the
uncritical ages, never worked "on the same principle as a writer
in our day," as regards archaeological precision; at least we are
acquainted with no example of such accuracy.

Let us take another instance of the critical fallacy. The age of
the Achaean warriors, who dwelt in the glorious halls of Mycenae,
was followed, at an interval, by the age represented in the relics
found in the older tombs outside the Dipylon gate of Athens, an
age beginning, probably, about 900-850 B.C. The culture of this
"Dipylon age," a time of geometrical ornaments on vases, and of