as they knew and remembered, with which doubtless they would beguile the tedium of their confinement.  That would be for the most part in the first and second imprisonments, extending from the years 1660 to 1672.  The third imprisonment was a short affair of only some nine months, spent in the little prison upon the bridge of Bedford, where there would be room for very few companions.  The modern bridge crosses the river at almost exactly the same spot; and if you look over the parapet you may see, when the river is low, traces of what seem to be the foundations of the old prison bridge.

When we would try to estimate the processes by which the great allegory was built up, the first fact that strikes us is its extreme aloofness from current events which must have been very familiar to him.  In others of his works he tells many stories of actual life, but these are of a private and more or less gossiping nature, many of them fantastic and grotesque, such as those appalling tales of swearers, drunkards, and other specially notorious sinners being snatched away by the devil—­narratives which bear the marks of crude popular imagination in details like the actual smell of sulphur left behind.  In the whole Pilgrim’s Progress there is no reference whatever to the Civil War, in which we know that Bunyan had fought, although there are certain parts of it which were probably suggested by events of that campaign.  The allegory is equally silent concerning the Great Fire and the Great Plague of London, which were both fresh in the memory of every living man.  The only phrase which might have been suggested by the Fire, is that in which the Pilgrim says, “I hear that our little city is to be destroyed by fire”—­a phrase which obviously has much more direct connection with the destruction of Sodom than with that of London.  The only suggestions of those disastrous latter years of the reign of Charles the Second, are some doubtful allusions to the rise and fall of persecution, few of which can be clearly identified with any particular events.

There are several interesting indications that Bunyan made use of recent and contemporary secular literature.  The demonology of the Pilgrim’s Progress is quite different from that of the Holy War.  It used to be suggested that Bunyan had altered his views in consequence of the publication of Milton’s Paradise Regained, which appeared in 1671.  That was when it was generally supposed that he had written the Pilgrim’s Progress in his earlier imprisonment.  If, as is now conceded, it was in the later imprisonment that he wrote the book, this theory loses much of its plausibility, for Milton published his Paradise Regained before the first edition of the Pilgrim’s Progress was penned.  It is, of course, always possible that between the Pilgrim’s Progress and the Holy War Bunyan may have seen Milton’s work, or may have been told about it, for he certainly