brings the whole company of pilgrims to the banks of the dark river at one time, and sends them over in succession, following one another rapidly through the Golden Gate of the City.  The four boys with their wives and children, it is true, stay behind awhile, but there is an evident incongruity in their doing so when the allegory has brought them all to what stands for the close of their earthly pilgrimage.  Bunyan’s mistake was in gratifying his inventive genius and making his band of pilgrims so large.  He could get them together and make them travel in company without any sacrifice of dramatic truth, which, however, he was forced to disregard when the time came for their dismissal.  The exquisite pathos of the description of the passage of the river by Christian and Hopeful blinds us to what may be almost termed the impossibility of two persons passing through the final struggle together, and dying at the same moment, but this charm is wanting in the prosaic picture of the company of fellow-travellers coming down to the water’s edge, and waiting till the postman blows his horn and bids them cross.  Much as the Second Part contains of what is admirable, and what no one but Bunyan could have written, we feel after reading it that, in Mr. Froude’s words, the rough simplicity is gone, and has been replaced by a tone of sentiment which is almost mawkish.  “Giants, dragons, and angelic champions carry us into a spurious fairyland where the knight-errant is a preacher in disguise.  Fair ladies and love-matches, however decorously chastened, suit ill with the sternness of the mortal conflict between the soul and sin.”  With the acknowledged shortcomings of the Second Part of “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” we may be well content that Bunyan never carried out the idea hinted at in the closing words of his allegory:  “Shall it be my lot to go that way again, I may give those that desire it an account of what I am here silent about; in the meantime I bid my reader—­Adieu.”

Bunyan’s second great allegorical work, “The Holy War,” need not detain us long.  Being an attempt, and in the nature of things an unsuccessful attempt, to clothe what writers on divinity call “the plan of salvation” in a figurative dress, the narrative, with all its vividness of description in parts, its clearly drawn characters with their picturesque nomenclature, and the stirring vicissitudes of the drama, is necessarily wanting in the personal interest which attaches to an individual man, like Christian, and those who are linked with or follow his career.  In fact, the tremendous realities of the spiritual history of the human race are entirely unfit for allegorical treatment as a whole.  Sin, its origin, its consequences, its remedy, and the apparent failure of that remedy though administered by Almighty hands, must remain a mystery for all time.  The attempts made by Bunyan, and by one of much higher intellectual power and greater poetic gifts than Bunyan—­John Milton—­to bring that mystery within the grasp of the finite intellect, only render it more perplexing.  The proverbial line tells us that—­