There are many gems in the Second Part of the Pilgrim’s Progress which are full of mother-wit and sly fun.  Mr. Honest confesses, “I came from the town of Stupidity; it lieth about four degrees beyond the City of Destruction.”  Then there is Mr. Fearing, that morbidly self-conscious creature, who is so much at home in the Valley of Humiliation that he kneels down and kisses the flowers in its grass.  He is a man who can never get rid of himself for a moment, and who bores all the company with his illimitable and anxious introspection.  Yet, in Vanity Fair, when practical facts have to be faced instead of morbid fancies and inflamed conscience, he is the most valiant of men, whom they can hardly keep from getting himself killed, and for that matter all the rest of them.  Here, again, is an inimitable flash of insight, where Simple, Sloth, and Presumption have prevailed with “one Short-Wind, one Sleepy-Head, and with a young woman, her name was Dull, to turn out of the way and become as they.”

Every now and then these natural touches of portraiture rise to a true sublimity, as all writing that is absolutely true to the facts of human nature tends to do.  Great-Heart says to Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, “Let me see thy sword,” and when he has taken it in his hand and looked at it for awhile, he adds, “Ha! it is a right Jerusalem blade.”  That sword lingers in Bunyan’s imagination, for, at the close of Valiant’s life, part of his dying speech is this “My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it.  My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me that I have fought His battles.”

Bunyan is so evidently an idealist and a prince of spiritual men, that no one needs to point out this characteristic of the great dreamer, nor to advertise so obvious a thing as his spiritual idealism.  We have accordingly taken that for granted and left it to the reader to recognise in every page for himself.  We have sought in this to show what has sometimes been overlooked, how very human the man and his work are.  Yet his humanism is ever at the service of the spirit, enlivening his book and inspiring it with a perpetual and delicious interest, but never for a moment entangling him again in the old yoke of bondage, from which at his conversion he had been set free.  For the human as opposed to the divine, the fleshly as the rival of the spiritual, he has an open and profound contempt, which he expresses in no measured terms in such passages as that concerning Adam the First and Madam Wanton.  These are for him sheer pagans.  At the cave, indeed, which his pilgrim visits at the farther end of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, we read that Pope and Pagan dwelt there in old time, but that Pagan has been dead many a day.  Yet the pagan spirit lives on in many forms, and finds an abiding place and home in Vanity Fair.  As Professor Firth has pointed out, Ben Jonson, in his play Bartholomew Fair, had already