description.  The same faculties reappear in such mere fragments as that of Waldhere and the “Finnsburgh” fight:  but they are shown much more fully in the Saints’ Lives—­best of all in the Andreas, no doubt, but remarkably also (especially considering the slender amount of “happenings”) in the Guthlac and the Juliana.  In fact the very fragments of Anglo-Saxon poetry, by a sort of approximation which they show to dramatic narrative and which with a few exceptions is far less present in the classics, foretell much more clearly and certainly than in the case of some other foretellings which have been detected in them, the future achievements of English literature in the department of fiction. The Ruin (the finest thing perhaps in all Anglo-Saxon) is a sort of background study for something that might have been much better than The Last Days of Pompeii:  and The Complaint of Deor, in its allusion to the adventures of the smith Weland and others, makes one sorry that some one more like the historian of a later and decadent though agreeable Wayland the Smith, had not told us the tale that is now left untold.  A crowd of fantastic imaginings or additions, to supply the main substance, and a certain common-sense grasp of actual conditions and circumstances to set them upon, and contrast them with—­these are the great requirements of Fiction in life and character.  You must mix prose and poetry to get a good romance or even novel.  The consciences of the ancients revolted from this mixture of kinds; but there was no such revolt in the earlier moderns, and least of all in our own mediaeval forefathers.

So few people are really acquainted with the whole range of Romance (even in English), or with any large part of it, that one may without undue presumption set down in part, if not in whole, to ignorance, a doctrine and position which we must now attack.  This is that romance and novel are widely separated from each other; and that the historian of the novel is really straying out of his ground if he meddles with Romance.  These are they who would make our proper subject begin with Marivaux and Richardson, or at earliest with Madame de La Fayette, who exclude Bunyan altogether, and sometimes go so far as to question the right of entry to Defoe.  But the counter-arguments are numerous:  and any one of them would almost suffice by itself.  In the first place the idea of the novel arising so late is unnatural and unhistorical:  these Melchisedecs without father or mother are not known in literature.  In the second a pedantic insistence on the exclusive definition of the novel involves one practical inconvenience which no one, even among those who believe in it, has yet dared to face.  You must carry your wall of partition along the road as well as across it:  and write separate histories of Novel and Romance for the last two centuries.  The present writer can only say that, though he has dared some tough adventures in literary history, he would altogether decline this.  Without the help of the ants that succoured Psyche against Venus that heap would indeed be ill to sort.