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 two mightiest literatures behind them.