Not less remarkable, and only a little less new, is the vividness and sufficiency of the scene painting and setting.  It has been said that the great novelists not only provide us with a world of friends more real and enjoyable than the actual folk we know, but also with a world for those friends to live in, more real and far more enjoyable than the world in which we ourselves sojourn.  And this is well seen of Christian.  The Slough of Despond and the terrible overhanging hill; the gateway and the Interpreter’s House and the House Beautiful; the ups and downs of the road, and the arbours and the giants’ dens:  Beulah and the Delectable Mountains:—­one knows them as one knows the country that one has walked over, and perhaps even better.  There is no description for description’s sake:  yet nothing is wanting of the descriptive kind.

Yet all these things are—­as they should be—­only subsidiary to the main interest of the Pilgrimage itself.  Once more, one may fear that it is no good sign of the wits of the age that readers should be unable to discard familiarity with the argument of the story.  It is the way in which that argument is worked out and illustrated that is the thing.  I have never myself, since I became thoroughly acquainted with Lydgate’s Englishing of Deguilevile’s Pilgrimage of the Soul of Man, had any doubt that—­in some way or other, direct or indirect, at tenth or twentieth hand perhaps—­Bunyan was acquainted with it:  but this is of no importance.  He might undoubtedly have got all his materials straight out of the Bible.  But his working of them up is all his own, and is wonderful.  Here, to begin with, is the marvel not merely of a continuation which is not a falling off, but of a repetition of the same general scheme with different but closely connected personages, which is entirely free from monotony.  One is so accustomed to the facts that perhaps it hardly strikes one at first how extraordinarily audacious the attempt is:  nay, the very success of it may blind all but critics to the difficulty.  It is no wonder that people tried further continuations and further complications:  still less wonder that they utterly failed.  Probably even Bunyan himself could not have “done it a third time.”  But he did it these twice with such vividness of figure and action; such completeness of fable; such sufficiency of behaviour and of speech as have scarcely ever been equalled.  As ideal as Spenser, as real as Defoe:  such is Bunyan.  And he shows this realism and this idealism in a prose narrative, bringing the thoughts and actions and characters and speech of fictitious human beings before his readers—­for their inspection perhaps; for their delight certainly.  If this is not the being and the doing of a novelist this deponent very humbly declareth that he knoweth not what the being and the doing of a novelist are.

We must now turn to two small but noteworthy attempts at the kind, which have been referred to above.