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 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 mediæval forefathers.