But, once more, we must contract the sweep, and quicken the pace to deal not with possible origins, but with actual results—­not with Ancient or Transition literature, but with the literature of English in the department first of fiction generally and then, with a third and last narrowing, to the main subject of English fiction in prose.

The very small surviving amount, and the almost completely second-hand character, of Anglo-Saxon literature have combined to frustrate what might have been expected from another characteristic of it—­the unusual equality of its verse and prose departments.  We have only one—­not quite entire but substantive—­prose tale in Anglo-Saxon, the version of the famous story of Apollonius of Tyre, which was to be afterwards declined by Chaucer, but attempted by his friend and contemporary Gower, and to be enshrined in the most certain of the Shakespearean “doubtfuls,” Pericles.  It most honestly gives itself out as a translation (no doubt from the Latin though there was an early Greek original) and it deals briefly with the subject.  But as an example of narrative style it is very far indeed from being contemptible:  and in passages such as Apollonius’ escape from shipwreck, and his wooing of the daughter of Arcestrates, there is something which is different from style, and with which style is not always found in company—­that faculty of telling a story which has been already referred to.  Nor does this fail in the narrative portions of the prose Saints’ Lives and Homilies, especially Aelfric’s, which we possess; in fact it is in these last distinctly remarkable—­as where Aelfric tells the tale of the monk who spied on St. Cuthbert’s seaside devotions.  The same faculty is observable in Latin work, not least in Bede’s still more famous telling of the Caedmon story, and of the vision of the other world.

But these faculties have better chance of exhibiting themselves in the verse division of our Anglo-Saxon wreckage. Beowulf itself consists of one first-rate story and one second-rate but not despicable tale, hitched together more or less anyhow.  The second, with good points, is, for us, negligible:  the first is a “yarn” of the primest character.  One may look back to the Odyssey itself without finding anything so good, except the adventures of the Golden Ass which had all the story-work of two mightiest literatures behind them.  As literature on the other hand, Beowulf may be overpraised:  it has been so frequently.  But let anybody with the slightest faculty of “conveyance” tell the first part of the story to a tolerably receptive audience, and he will not doubt (unless he is fool enough to set the effect down to his own gifts and graces) about its excellence as such.  There is character—­not much, but enough to make it more than a mere story of adventure—­and adventure enough for anything; there is by no means ineffectual speech—­even dialogue—­of a kind:  and there is some effective and picturesque