element in it, though there are wedding bells.  Mercy is indeed quite nice enough for a heroine:  but Bunyan might have bestowed her better than on a young gentleman so very young that he had not long before made himself (no doubt allegorically) ill with unripe and unwholesome fruit.  But if he had done so, the suspicions of his brethren—­they were acute enough as it was not to mistake the character of the book, whatever modern critics may do—­would have been even more unallayable.  And, as it is, the “alluring countenance” does shed not a little grace upon the story, or at least upon the Second Part:  while the intenser character of the First hardly requires this.  Any other lack is, to the present writer, imperceptible.  The romance interest of quest, adventure, achievement, is present to the fullest degree:  and what is sometimes called the pure novel interest of character and conversation is present in a degree not lower.  It must be accepted as a great blessing, even by those who regard Puritanism as an almost unmitigated curse, that its principles forbade Bunyan to think of choosing the profane and abominable stage-play as the form of his creation.  We had had our fill of good plays, and were beginning to drink of that which was worse:  while we had no good novels and wanted them.  Of course the large amount of actual “Tig and Tirry” dialogue (as Dr. Johnson would say) is probably one of the things which have made precisians shy of accepting the Progress for what it really is.  But we must remember that this encroachment on the dramatic province was exactly what was wanted to remove the reproach of fiction.  The inability to put actual conversation of a lively kind in the mouths of personages has been indicated as one of the great defects of the novel up to this time.  Except Cervantes, it is difficult to think of any novelist who had shown himself able to supply the want.  Bunyan can do it as few have done it even since his time.  The famous dialogue of Christian and By-ends is only the best—­if it is the best—­of scores nearly or quite as good.  The curious intellectual flaccidity of the present day seems to be “put off” by the “ticket” names; but no one who has the true literary sense cares for these one way or another, or is more disturbed by them than if they were Wilkins and Jones.  Just as Coleridge observed that to enjoy some kinds of poetry you must suspend disbelief, so, with mere literary fashions, you must suspend disagreement.  We should not call By-ends By-ends now:  and whether we should do better or worse nobody, as Plato says, knows but the Deity.  But the best of us would be hard put to it to make By-ends reveal his By-endishness more perfectly than he does by his conversation, and without any ticket-name at all.