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