My father’s palace shall be thine,
       Yea, in it thou shalt sit and sing;
     My little bird, if thou’lt be mine,
       The whole year round shall be thy spring.

     I’ll keep thee safe from cat and cur,
       No manner o’ harm shall come to thee: 
     Yea, I will be thy succourer,
       My bosom shall thy cabin be.”

The last line might have been written by Ben Jonson, and the description of sunrise in the former poem might almost have been from Chaucer’s pen.

Yet the finest poetry of all is the prose allegory of the Pilgrim’s Progress.  English prose had taken many centuries to form, in the moulding hands of Chaucer, Malory, and Bacon.  It had come at last to Bunyan with all its flexibility and force ready to his hand.  He wrote with virgin purity, utterly free from mannerisms and affectations; and, without knowing himself for a writer of fine English, produced it.

The material of the allegory also is supplied from ancient sources.  One curious paragraph in Bunyan’s treatise entitled Sighs from Hell, gives us a broad hint of this.  “The Scriptures, thought I then, what are they?  A dead letter, a little ink and paper, of three or four shillings price.  Alack! what is Scripture?  Give me a ballad, a news-book, George on Horseback or Bevis of Southampton.  Give me some book that teaches curious Arts, that tells old Fables.”  In The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven there is a longer list of such romances as these, including Ellen of Rummin, and many others.  As has been already stated, these tales of ancient folklore would come into his hands either by recitation or in the form of chap-books.  The chap-book literature of Old England was most voluminous and interesting.  It consisted of romances and songs, sold at country fairs and elsewhere, and the passing reference which we have quoted proves conclusively, what we might have known without any proof, that Bunyan knew them.

George on Horseback has been identified by Professor Firth with the Seven Champions of England, an extremely artificial romance, which may be taken as typical of hundreds more of its kind.  The 1610 edition of it is a very lively book with a good deal of playing to the gallery, such as this:  “As for the name of Queen, I account it a vain title; for I had rather be an English lady than the greatest empress in the world.”  There is not very much in this romance which Bunyan has appropriated, although there are several interesting correspondences.  It is very courtly and conventional.  The narrative is broken here and there by lyrics, quite in Bunyan’s manner, but it is difficult to imagine Bunyan, with his direct and simple taste, spending much time in reading such sentences as the following:  “By the time the purple-spotted morning had parted with her grey, and the sun’s bright countenance appeared on the mountain-tops, St. George had rode twenty miles from the Persian Court.”  On the other hand, when Great-Heart allows Giant Despair to rise after his fall, showing his chivalry in refusing to take advantage of the fallen giant, we remember the incident of Sir Guy and Colebrand in the Seven Champions.