The _Vision of St.Paul_--one of the earliest examples and the starter it would seem, if not of the whole class of sacred Romances, at any rate of the large subsection devoted to Things after Death--has been put as early as "before 400 A.D." It would probably be difficult to date such legends as those of St.Margaret and St.Catherine _too_ early, having regard to their intrinsic indications: and the vast cycle of Our Lady, though probably later, must have begun long before the modern languages were ready for it, while that of the Cross should be earlier still.

And let it be remembered that these Saints' Lives, which are still infinitely good reading, are not in the least confined to homiletic necessities.
The jejuneness and woodenness from which the modern religious story too often suffers are in no way chargeable upon all, or even many, of them.
They have the widest range of incident--natural as well as supernatural: their touches of nature are indeed extended far beyond mere incident.
Purely comic episodes are by no means wanting: and these, like the parallel passages in the dramatising of these very legends, were sure to lead to isolation of them, and to a secular continuation.
But, once more, we must contract the sweep, and quicken the pace to deal not with possible origins, but with actual results--not with Ancient or Transition literature, but with the literature of English in the department first of fiction generally and then, with a third and last narrowing, to the main subject of English fiction in prose.
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.