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.