Mythologie, p. 222. Footnote 711: The Devil and the Pater Noster were to contend together at Doomsday: each was to assume fifteen different forms. Sal. Sat. p. 145. Footnote 712: See Beówulf, ii. Postscript, and the Stammtafel der Westsachsen. Footnote 713: In the legend of Juliana, the subordinate devil speaks of Satan as his father and king. Cod. Exon. pp. 261, 273. And so also in Salomon and Saturn (p. 141), he is called Satan’s thane. Again, in the same composition, Satan is called the devil’s father: “The Pater Noster will shoot the devil with boiling shafts; and the lightning will burn and mark him, and the rain will be shed over him, and the thick darkness confuse him, and the thunder thrash him with the fiery axe, and drive him to the iron chain wherein his father dwelleth, Satan and Sathiel.” p. 149. In the legend of St. Andrew, Satan himself appears, which may be owing to its Greek origin. See Vercelli Poems, Andr. l. 2388: still, in another passage Satan sends his children. Ibid. l. 2692. ----- Thus throughout the strange confusion which besets all Anglosaxon compositions in which the devil is introduced either as a tempter or a persecutor of the holy and just, we may perceive a ray of ancient heathendom, gloomy enough, no doubt, but far less miserable than the vile materialism of the notions with which it has been mixed up. The rude _Eoten_ or Titan is not nearly so repugnant to our Christian ideas as the gross corporeal fiends who have grown out of him, and who play so conspicuous a part in Anglosaxon hagiology or purgatorial legends: nor is it easy to conceive any superstition more degrading than that which Eastern or perhaps even Roman traditions thus engrafted upon the ancient creed. With these we are not called upon to deal in any further detail, for though they have no claim whatever to be called Christian, they certainly have nothing to do with Anglosaxon heathendom. The Grendels and Nicors of our forefathers were gods of nature, the spirits of the wood and wave: they sunk into their degraded and disgusting forms only when the devils of a barbarous superstition came to be confounded and mixed up with them. There is still something genuine and poetical in the account which a monk of St. Gall gives of the colloquy between the ancient gods when the missionaries settled on the shores of the lake of Constance; when in the dead of night, the holy anchoret watching at his nets, Heard how the spirit of the flood Spake to the spirit of the hill: