With omissions, however, the book well deserves perusal, as a picture such as only Bunyan or his rival in lifelike portraiture, Defoe, could have drawn of vulgar English life in the latter part of the seventeenth century, in a commonplace country town such as Bedford.  It is not at all a pleasant picture.  The life described, when not gross, is sordid and foul, is mean and commonplace.  But as a description of English middle-class life at the epoch of the Restoration and Revolution, it is invaluable for those who wish to put themselves in touch with that period.  The anecdotes introduced to illustrate Bunyan’s positions of God’s judgment upon swearers and sinners, convicting him of a credulity and a harshness of feeling one is sorry to think him capable of, are very interesting for the side-lights they throw upon the times and the people who lived in them.  It would take too long to give a sketch of the story, even if a summary could give any real estimate of its picturesque and vivid power.  It is certainly a remarkable, if an offensive book.  As with “Robinson Crusoe” and Defoe’s other tales, we can hardly believe that we have not a real history before us.  We feel that there is no reason why the events recorded should not have happened.  There are no surprises; no unlooked-for catastrophes; no providential interpositions to punish the sinner or rescue the good man.  Badman’s pious wife is made to pay the penalty of allowing herself to be deceived by a tall, good-looking, hypocritical scoundrel.  He himself pursues his evil way to the end, and “dies like a lamb, or as men call it, like a Chrisom child sweetly and without fear,” but the selfsame Mr. Badman still, not only in name, but in condition; sinning onto the last, and dying with a heart that cannot repent.

Mr. Froude’s summing up of this book is so masterly that we make no apology for presenting it to our readers.  “Bunyan conceals nothing, assumes nothing, and exaggerates nothing.  He makes his bad man sharp and shrewd.  He allows sharpness and shrewdness to bring him the reward which such qualities in fact command.  Badman is successful; is powerful; he enjoys all the pleasures which money can bring; his bad wife helps him to ruin, but otherwise he is not unhappy, and he dies in peace.  Bunyan has made him a brute, because such men do become brutes.  It is the real punishment of brutal and selfish habits.  There the figure stands—­a picture of a man in the rank of English life with which Bunyan was most familiar; travelling along the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire, as the way to Emmanuel’s Land was through the Slough of Despond and the Valley of the Shadow of Death.  Pleasures are to be found among the primroses, such pleasures as a brute can be gratified by.  Yet the reader feels that even if there was no bonfire, he would still prefer to be with Christian.”

FOOTNOTES

{1} A small enclosure behind a cottage.