in double column.  But it is the little allegory embedded in one of these volumes which has made his fame eternal, and for the most part the rest are remembered now only in so far as they throw light upon that story.  One exception must be made in favour of Grace Abounding.  This is Bunyan’s autobiography, in which he describes, without allegory, the course of his spiritual experience.  For an understanding of the Pilgrim’s Progress it is absolutely necessary to know that companion volume.

It is very curious to watch the course of criticism as it was directed to him and to his story.  The eighteenth century had lost the keenness of former controversies, and from its classic balcony it looked down upon what seemed to it the somewhat sordid arena of the past. The Examiner complains that he never yet knew an author that had not his admirers.  Bunyan and Quarles have passed through several editions and pleased as many readers as Dryden and Tillotson.  Even Cowper, timidly appreciative and patronising, wrote of the “ingenious dreamer”—­

     “I name thee not, lest so despised a name
     Should move a sneer at thy deserved fame,”

—­lines which have a pathetic irony in them, as we contrast the anxious Cowper, with the occasional revivals of interest and the age-long tone of patronage which have been meted out to him, with the robust and sturdy immortality of the man he shrank from naming.  Swift discovered Bunyan’s literary power, and later Johnson and Southey did him justice.  In the nineteenth century his place was secured for ever, and Macaulay’s essay on him will probably retain its interest longer than anything else that Macaulay wrote.

We are apt to think of him as a mere dreamer, spinning his cobwebs of imagination wholly out of his own substance—­a pure idealist, whose writing dwells among his ideals in a region ignorant of the earth.  In one of his own apologies he tells us, apparently in answer to accusations that had been made against him, that he did not take his work from anybody, but that it came from himself alone.  Doubtless that is true so far as the real originality of his work is concerned, its general conception, and the working out of its details point by point.  Yet, to imagine that if there had been no other English literature the Pilgrim’s Progress would have been exactly what it is, is simply to ignore the facts of the case.  John Bunyan is far more interesting just because his work is part of English literature, because it did feel the influences of his own time and of the past, than it could ever have been as the mere monstrosity of detachment which it has been supposed to be.  The idealist who merely dreams and takes no part in the battle, refusing to know or utilise the writing of any other man, can be no fair judge of the life which he criticises, and no reliable guide among its facts.