The Pilgrim’s Progress he has become, despite his immense capacity for fear, a hero.  The description of the fight with Apollyon is a piece of heroic literature equal to anything in those romances of adventure that went to the head of Don Quixote.  “But, as God would have it, while Apollyon was fetching his last blow, thereby to make a full end of this good man, Christian nimbly reached out his hand for his sword, and caught it, saying:  ’Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy! when I fall I shall arise’; and with that gave him a deadly thrust, which made him give back, as one that had received a mortal wound.”  Heroic literature cannot surpass this.  Its appeal is universal.  When one reads it, one ceases to wonder that there exists even a Catholic version of The Pilgrim’s Progress, in which Giant Pope is discreetly omitted, but the heroism of Christian remains.  Bunyan disliked being called by the name of any sect.  His imagination was certainly as little sectarian as that of a seventeenth-century preacher could well be.  His hero is primarily not a Baptist, but a man.  He bears, perhaps, almost too close a resemblance to Everyman, but his journey, his adventures and his speech save him from sinking into a pulpit generalization.

III.—­THOMAS CAMPION

Thomas Campion is among English poets the perfect minstrel.  He takes love as a theme rather than is burned by it.  His most charming, if not his most beautiful poem begins:  “Hark, all you ladies.”  He sings of love-making rather than of love.  His poetry, like Moore’s—­though it is infinitely better poetry than Moore’s—­is the poetry of flirtation.  Little is known about his life, but one may infer from his work that his range of amorous experience was rather wide than deep.  There is no lady “with two pitch balls stuck in her face for eyes” troubling his pages with a constant presence.  The Mellea and Caspia—­the one too easy of capture, the other too difficult—­to whom so many of the Latin epigrams are addressed, are said to have been his chief schoolmistresses in love.  But he has buried most of his erotic woes, such as they were, in a dead language.  His English poems do not portray him as a man likely to die of love, or even to forget a meal on account of it.  His world is a happy land of song, in which ladies all golden in the sunlight succeed one another as in a pageant of beauties.  Lesbia, Laura, and Corinna with her lute equally inhabit it.  They are all characters in a masque of love, forms and figures in a revel.  Their maker is an Epicurean and an enemy to “the sager sort”: 

  My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love,
  And, though the sager sort our deeps reprove,
  Let us not weigh them.  Heav’n’s great lamps do dive
  Into their west, and straight again revive. 
  But, soon as once is set our little light,
  Then must we sleep our ever-during night.

Ladies in so bright and insecure a day must not be permitted to “let their lovers moan.”  If they do, they will incur the just vengeance of the Fairy Queen Proserpina, who will send her attendant fairies to pinch their white hands and pitiless arms.  Campion is the Fairy Queen’s court poet.  He claims all men—­perhaps, one ought rather to say all women—­as her subjects: