ircumstances which the critic will insist on; and
circumstances which, if the dazzle of a paradox, or the appeal to the
innate and universal sympathy for antiquity keep them in the background
for a while, will, sooner or later, rise against the author who
overlooked them.

Neither are arguments from the antiquity of language conclusive. When
two works differ from each other in respect to the signs of antiquity
exhibited in their phraseology, the inference that the oldest in point
of speech is _proportionably_ old in point of time is not the only one.
It is an easy thing to say that in the Latin literature the language of
Ennius represents a date a hundred years earlier than that of Cicero,
and that of Cicero a date 400 earlier than the time of Boethius, and
that when we meet elsewhere compositions which differ from each other as
the Latin of Ennius does from that of Boethius, there is 500 years
difference between them. It is by no means certain that any two
languages alter at the same rate.

But an average may be struck, and it may be said that greater antiquity
of expression is _prima facie_ evidence of a greater antiquity of date.
It is: but is only so when we are quite sure that the _dialects_ of the
two specimens are the same. There are works printed this very year in
Iceland which, if their dates were unknown, would pass for being a
hundred years older than the Swedish of the eleventh century.

It is only when the supporter of the authenticity of a work of singular
and unique antiquity can begin with an epoch of comparatively recent
date, and argue backwards through a series of continuous works, each
older than the other, to one still older than any, that he can
reasonably accuse the critic who demurs to his deductions of
captiousness. In this way the antiquity of the oldest Chinese annals is
invalidated: in this way the date of the Indian Vedas (1400 B.C.). But
the great classical literatures stand the test, and from the present
time to Claudian, from Claudian to Ennius, and from Ennius to
Archilochus we trace a classical literature with all its works in
continuity; each pointing to some one older than itself. Even this
forbids an excessive antiquity to Homer.

Again--the likelihood of forgery must be continually kept in mind; so
much so, that even in the unexceptionable literature of the classics, if
it could be shewn that any age between the present and the eighth
century B.C., were an age in which the Greek