the flooded meadows with Christian and Hopeful; of sinking in deep water when swimming over a river, going down and rising up half dead, and needing all his companion’s strength and skill to keep his head above the stream.  Vanity Fair is evidently drawn from the life.  The great yearly fair of Stourbridge, close to Cambridge, which Bunyan had probably often visited in his tinker days, with its streets of booths filled with “wares of all kinds from all countries,” its “shows, jugglings, cheats games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of every kind,” its “great one of the fair,” its court of justice and power of judgment, furnished him with the materials for his picture.  Scenes like these he draws with sharp defined outlines.  When he had to describe what he only knew by hearsay, his pictures are shadowy and cold.  Never having been very far from home, he had had no experience of the higher types of beauty and grandeur in nature, and his pen moves in fetters when he attempts to describe them.  When his pilgrims come to the Hill Difficulty and the Delectable Mountains, the difference is at once seen.  All his nobler imagery is drawn from Scripture.  As Hallam has remarked, “There is scarcely a circumstance or metaphor in the Old Testament which does not find a place bodily and literally in ’The Pilgrim’s Progress,’ and this has made his imagination appear more creative than it really is.”

It would but weary the reader to follow the details of a narrative which is so universally known.  Who needs to be told that in the pilgrimage here described is represented in allegorical dress the course of a human soul convinced of sin, struggling onwards to salvation through the trials and temptations that beset its path to its eternal home?  The book is so completely wrought into the mind and memory, that most of us can at once recall the incidents which chequer the pilgrim’s way, and realize their meaning; the Slough of Despond, in which the man convinced of his guilt and fleeing from the wrath to come, in his agonizing self-consciousness is in danger of being swallowed up in despair; the Wicket Gate, by which he enters on the strait and narrow way of holiness; the Interpreter’s House, with his visions and acted parables; the Wayside Cross, at the sight of which the burden of guilt falls from the pilgrim’s back, and he is clothed with change of raiment; the Hill Difficulty, which stands right in his way, and which he must surmount, not circumvent; the lions which he has to pass, not knowing that they are chained; the Palace Beautiful, where he is admitted to the communion of the faithful, and sits down to meat with them; the Valley of Humiliation, the scene of his desperate but victorious encounter with Apollyon; the Valley of the Shadow of Death, with its evil sights and doleful sounds, where one of the wicked ones whispers into his ear thoughts of blasphemy which he cannot distinguish from the suggestions of his own mind; the