A few books whose shaping influences lay in the past belong by their date to this period.  John Bunyan, a poor tinker, whose reading was almost wholly in the Bible and Fox’s Book of Martyrs, imprisoned for twelve years in Bedford jail for preaching at conventicles, wrote and, in 1678, published his Pilgrim’s Progress, the greatest of religious allegories.  Bunyan’s spiritual experiences were so real to him that they took visible concrete shape in his imagination as men, women, cities, landscapes.  It is the simplest, the most transparent of allegories.  Unlike the Faerie Queene, the story of Pilgrim’s Progress has no reason for existing apart from its inner meaning, and yet its reality is so vivid that children read of Vanity Fair and the Slough of Despond and Doubting Castle and the Valley of the Shadow of Death with the same belief with which they read of Crusoe’s cave or Aladdin’s palace.

It is a long step from the Bedford tinker to the cultivated poet of Paradise Lost.  They represent the poles of the Puritan party.  Yet it may admit of a doubt whether the Puritan epic is, in essentials, as vital and original a work as the Puritan allegory.  They both came out quietly and made little noise at first.  But the Pilgrim’s Progress got at once into circulation, and hardly a single copy of the first edition remains.  Milton, too—­who received ten pounds for the copyright of Paradise Lost—­seemingly found that “fit audience though few” for which he prayed, as his poem reached its second impression in five years (1672).  Dryden visited him in his retirement and asked leave to turn it into rime and put it on the stage as an opera.  “Ay,” said Milton, good humoredly, “you may tag my verses.”  And accordingly they appeared, duly tagged, in Dryden’s operatic masque, the State of Innocence.  In this startling conjunction we have the two ages in a nutshell:  the Commonwealth was an epic, the Restoration an opera.

The literary period covered by the life of Pope, 1688-1744, is marked off by no distinct line from the generation before it.  Taste continued to be governed by the precepts of Boileau and the French classical school.  Poetry remained chiefly didactic and satirical, and satire in Pope’s hands was more personal even than in Dryden’s, and addressed itself less to public issues.  The literature of the “Augustan age” of Queen Anne (1702-1714) was still more a literature of the town and of fashionable society than that of the Restoration had been.  It was also closely involved with party struggles of Whig and Tory, and the ablest pens on either side were taken into alliance by the political leaders.  Swift was in high favor with the Tory ministers, Oxford and Bolingbroke, and his pamphlets, the Public Spirit of the Whigs and the Conduct of the Allies, were rewarded with the deanery of St. Patrick’s, Dublin.  Addison became secretary of state under a Whig government.  Prior was in the diplomatic