European literature (except drama) before it.  This latter fact has indeed obtained a fair amount of recognition since Mr. Froude drew the attention of the general reader to it in his book on Bunyan, in the “English Men of Letters” series, five-and-twenty years ago:  but it must have struck careful readers of the great tinker’s minor works long before.  Indeed there are very good internal reasons for thinking that no less a person than Thackeray must have known Mr. Badman.  This wonderful little sketch, however—­the related history of a man who is an utter rascal both in family and commercial relations, but preserves his reputation intact and does not even experience any deathbed repentance—­is rather an unconscious study for a character in a novel—­a sketch of a bourgeois Barnes Newcome—­than anything more.  It has the old drawback of being narrated, not acted or spoken at first hand:  and so, though it is in a sense Fielding at nearly his best, more than half a century before Fielding attempted Joseph Andrews, no more need be said of it.  So, too, the religious element and the allegory are too prominent in The Holy War—­the novelist’s desk is made too much of a pulpit in large parts of it.  Other parts, concerning the inhabitants of Mansoul and their private affairs, are domestic novel-writing of nearly the pure kind:  and if The Pilgrim’s Progress did not exist, it would be worth while to pick them out and discuss them.  But, as it most fortunately does exist, this is not needful.

[5] The heroic kind had lent itself very easily and obviously to allegory.  Not very long before Bunyan English literature had been enriched with a specimen of this double variety which for Sir W. Raleigh “marks the lowest depth to which English romance writing sank.”  I do not know that I could go quite so far as this in regard to the book—­Bentivolio and Urania by Nathaniel Ingelo.  The first edition of this appeared in 1660:  the second (there seem to have been at least four) lies before me at this moment dated 1669, or nine years before the Progress itself.  You require a deep-sea-lead of uncommonly cunning construction to sound, register, and compare the profundities of the bathos in novels.  The book has about 400 folio pages very closely packed with type, besides an alphabetical index full of Hebrew and Greek derivations of its names—­“Gnothisauton,” “Achamoth,” “Ametameletus,” “Dogmapernes,” and so forth.  Its principles are inexorably virtuous; there is occasional action interspersed among its innumerable discourses, and I think it not improbable that if it were only possible to read it, it might do one some good.  But it would not be the good of the novel.

The only fault with the novel-character of the greater book which might possibly be found by a critic who did not let the allegory bite him, and was not frightened by the religion, is that there is next to no love