taken root; when they are growing he ceases from
watering. Also, the Almighty God so long showed his miracles to the
heathen folk until they were believing: when faith had sprung up over
all the world, then miracles ceased."[125]

The lives of the saints told by AElfric recall at times tales in the
Arabian Nights. There are transformations, disparitions, enchantments,
emperors who become hermits, statues that burst, and out of which comes
the devil. "Go," cries the apostle to the fiend, "go to the waste where
no bird flies, nor husbandman ploughs, nor voice of man sounds." The
"accursed spirit" obeys, and he appears all black, "with sharp visage
and ample beard. His locks hung to his ankles, his eyes were scattering
fiery sparks, sulphureous flame stood in his mouth, he was frightfully
feather-clad."[126] This is already the devil of the Mysteries, the one
described by Rabelais, almost in the same words. We can imagine the
effect of so minute a picture on the Saxon herdsmen assembled on Sunday
in their little mysterious churches, almost windowless, like that of
Bradford-on-Avon.

One peculiarity makes these sermons remarkable; in them can be discerned
a certain effort to attain to literary dignity. The preacher tries his
best to speak well. He takes all the more pains because he is slightly
ashamed, being himself learned, to write in view of such an illiterate
public. He does not know any longer Alfred's doubts, who, being
uncertain as to which words best express the meaning of his model, puts
down all those his memory or glossary supply: the reader can choose. The
authors of these homilies purposely write prose which comes near the
tone and forms of poetry. Such are almost always the beginnings of
literary prose. They go as far as to introduce a rude cadence in their
writings, and adapt thereto the special ornament of Germanic verse,
alliteration. Wulfstan and AElfric frequently afford their audience the
pleasure of those repeated sonorities, so much so that it has been
possible to publish a whole collection of sermons by the latter in the
form of poems.[127] Moreover, the subject itself is often poetic, and
the priest adorns his discourse with images and metaphors. Many passages
of the "Blickling Homilies," read in a translation, might easily be
taken for poetical extracts. Such are the descriptions of
contemporaneous evils, and of the signs that will herald the end of the
world, that world that "fleeth from us with