never solid beneath our feet. We find now that the poets are true
to tradition in the details of ancient life--now that the poets
introduce whatever modern details they please. The late poets have
now a very exact knowledge of the past; now, the late poets know
nothing about the past, or, again, some of the poets are fond of
actual and very minute archaeological research! The theory shifts
its position as may suit the point to be made at the moment by the
critic. All is arbitrary, and it is certain that logic demands a
very different method of inquiry. If Helbig and other critics of
his way of thinking mean that in the _Iliad_ (1) there are
parts of genuine antiquity; other parts (2) by poets who, with
stern accuracy, copied the old modes; other parts (3) by poets who
tried to copy but failed; with passages (4) by poets who
deliberately innovated; and passages (5) by poets who drew
fanciful pictures of the past "from their inner consciousness,"
while, finally (6), some poets made minute antiquarian researches;
and if the argument be that the critics can detect these six
elements, then we are asked to repose unlimited confidence in
critical powers of discrimination. The critical standard becomes
arbitrary and subjective.

It is our effort, then, in the following pages to show that the
_unus_ color of Wolf does pervade the Epics, that recent
details are not often, if ever, interpolated, that the poems
harmoniously represent one age, and that a brief age, of culture;
that this effect cannot, in a thoroughly uncritical period, have
been deliberately aimed at and produced by archaeological
learning, or by sedulous copying of poetic tradition, or by the
scientific labours of an editor of the sixth century B.C. We shall
endeavour to prove, what we have already indicated, that the