Every one who has followed the fortunes of Christian in the stately diction of the Pilgrim’s Progress must wish to know from whence came those wonderful word pictures with which the dreamer of Bedford Jail gems his masterpiece.  That phrase “delectable mountains” conjures up in each individual reader’s mind those particular hills wherever they may be, which are his own peculiar delight, and for which, exiled, his spirit so ardently longs.

It is not presuming too much to suppose that the scene in Bunyan’s mind was that long range of undulating downs sometimes rising into bold and arresting shape, and always with their finest aspect toward the Bedford plains and him who cast longing eyes toward them.  From almost any slight eminence on the south of Bedford town on a clear day the Dunstable and Ivinghoe hills are to be seen in distant beauty, and there is the strongest similarity between them and those glorious summits which every man of Sussex knows and loves so well.

The Chiltern Hills and the South Downs are built up of the same material, have had their peculiarities of shape and form carved by the same artificers—­rain and frost, sun and wind; their flowers are the same, and to outward seeming their sons and daughters are the same in the way that all hill folk are alike and yet all differ in some subtle way from the dweller in the plains.

Be this so or not our Downs are to us delectable mountains, and let the reader who scoffs at the noun remember that size is no criterion of either beauty or sublimity.  That Sussex lover and greatest of literary naturalists, Gilbert White, in perhaps his most frequently quoted passage so characterizes the “majestic chain”; to his contemporaries such a description was not out of place; our great grandfathers were appalled when brought from the calm tranquillity of the southern slopes to the stern dark melancholy of the mountains of Cumberland and Westmoreland.  The diary descriptions of those timid travellers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are full of such adjectives as “terrible,” “frightful,” “awful.”  One unlucky individual’s nerves caused him to stigmatize as “ghastly and disgusting” one of the finest scenes in the Lake District, probably unsurpassed in Europe for its perfectly balanced beauty of form and splendour of colouring.  To the general reader of those times the descriptive poems of Wordsworth were probably unmeaning rhapsodies.  Our ancestors, however, were very fond of “prospects.”  An old atlas of the counties of England, published about 1800, came into the writer’s hands recently.  The whole of the gentler hills, including every possible vantage point in the Downs, had been most carefully and neatly marked with the panorama visible from the summit; but even Kinder Scout and the Malverns came in for the same fate as the Welsh and Cumberland mountains, all of which had been left severely alone, though the intrepid traveller had braved the terrors of the Wrekin,