is a book which when once read can never be forgotten.  We too, every one of us, are pilgrims on the same road; and images and illustrations come back to us from so faithful an itinerary, as we encounter similar trials, and learn for ourselves the accuracy with which Bunyan has described them.  Time cannot impair its interest, or intellectual progress make it cease to be true to experience.”  Dr. Brown’s appreciative words may be added:  “With deepest pathos it enters into the stern battle so real to all of us, into those heart-experiences which make up, for all, the discipline of life.  It is this especially which has given to it the mighty hold which it has always had upon the toiling poor, and made it the one book above all books well-thumbed and torn to tatters among them.  And it is this which makes it one of the first books translated by the missionary who seeks to give true thoughts of God and life to heathen men.”

The Second Part of “The Pilgrim’s Progress” partakes of the character of almost all continuations.  It is, in Mr. Froude’s words, “only a feeble reverberation of the first part, which has given it a popularity it would have hardly attained by its own merits.  Christiana and her children are tolerated for the pilgrim’s sake to whom they belong.”  Bunyan seems not to have been insensible of this himself, when in his metrical preface he thus introduces his new work: 

   “Go now my little book to every place
   Where my first Pilgrim has but shown his face. 
   Call at their door; if any say ‘Who’s there?’
   Then answer thus, ‘Christiana is here.’ 
   If they bid thee come in, then enter thou
   With all thy boys.  And then, as thou know’st how,
   Tell who they are, also from whence they came;
   Perhaps they’ll know them by their looks or name.”

But although the Second Part must be pronounced inferior, on the whole, to the first, it is a work of striking individuality and graphic power, such as Bunyan alone could have written.  Everywhere we find strokes of his peculiar genius, and though in a smaller measure than the first, it has added not a few portraits to Bunyan’s spiritual picture gallery we should be sorry to miss, and supplied us with racy sayings which stick to the memory.  The sweet maid Mercy affords a lovely picture of gentle feminine piety, well contrasted with the more vigorous but still thoroughly womanly character of Christiana.  Great-Heart is too much of an abstraction:  a preacher in the uncongenial disguise of a knightly champion of distressed females and the slayer of giants.  But the other new characters have generally a vivid personality.  Who can forget Old Honesty, the dull good man with no mental gifts but of dogged sincerity, who though coming from the Town of Stupidity, four degrees beyond the City of Destruction, was “known for a cock of the right kind,” because he said the truth and stuck to it; or his companion, Mr. Fearing,