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