brest a-wonde
     That negh a-felde him to the grounde. 
     The geaunt thoughte this bataile hard,
     Anon he drough to him a dart,
     Throgh Beves scholder he hit schet,
     The blold ran doun to Beves’ fet,
     The Beves segh is owene blod
     Out of his wit he wex negh wod,
     Unto the geaunt ful swithe he ran,
     And kedde that he was doughti man,
     And smot ato his nekke bon;
     The geant fel to grounde anon.”

It is part of his general sympathy with the spirit of the romances that Bunyan’s giants were always real giants to him, and he evidently enjoyed them for their own sake as literary and imaginative creations, as well as for the sake of any truths which they might be made to enforce.  Despair and Slay-Good are distinct to his imagination.  His interest remains always twofold.  On the one hand there is allegory, and on the other hand there is live tale.  Sometimes the allegory breaks through and confuses the tale a little, as when Mercy begs for the great mirror that hangs in the dining-room of the shepherds, and carries it with her through the remainder of her journey.  Sometimes the allegory has to stop in order that a sermon may be preached on some particular point of theology, and such sermons are by no means short.  Still the story is so true to life that its irresistible simplicity and naturalness carry it on and make it immortal.  When we read such a conversation as that between old Honest and Mr. Standfast about Madam Bubble, we feel that the tale has ceased to be an allegory altogether and has become a novel.  This is perhaps more noticeable in the Second Part than in the First.  The First Part is indeed almost a perfect allegory; although even there, from time to time, the earnestness and rush of the writer’s spirit oversteps the bounds of consistency and happily forgets the moral because the story is so interesting, or forgets for a moment the story because the moral is so important.  In the Second Part the two characters fall apart more definitely.  Now you have delightful pieces of crude human nature, naive and sparkling.  Then you have long and intricate theological treatises.  Neither the allegorical nor the narrative unity is preserved to anything like the same extent as on the whole is the case in Part I. The shrewd and humorous touches of human nature are especially interesting.  Bunyan was by no means the gentle saint who shrank from strong language.  When the gate of Doubting Castle is opening, and at last the pilgrims have all but gone free, we read that “the lock went damnable hard.”  When Great-Heart is delighted with Mr. Honest, he calls him “a cock of the right kind.”  The poem On Christian Behaviour, which we have quoted, contains the lines—­

     “When all men’s cards are fully played,
     Whose will abide the light?”

These are quaint instances of the way in which even the questionable parts of the unregenerate life of the dreamer came in the end to serve the uses of his religion.