I loved to hear my Lord spoken of, and wherever I have seen the print of His shoe in the earth I have coveted to set my foot also.  His name has been to me as a civet-box; yea, sweeter than all perfumes.  His word I did use to gather for my food, and for antidotes against my faintings.  He has held me, and I have kept me from my iniquities.  Yea, my steps He has strengthened in my way.”  Now, while Standfast was thus in discourse his countenance changed, his strong man bowed down under him, and after he had said “Take me!” he ceased to be seen of them.  But how glorious it was to see how the open region was now filled with horses and chariots, with trumpeters and pipers, and with singers and players on stringed instruments, all to welcome the pilgrims as they went up and followed one another in at the beautiful gate of the city!

MADAM BUBBLE

   “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”—­Solomon.

   “I have overcome the world.”—­Our Lord.

“Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.  For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.  And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof.”—­John.

   “This bubble world.”—­Quarles.

Madam Bubble’s portrait was first painted by the Preacher.  And he painted her portrait with extraordinary insight, boldness, and truthfulness.  There is that in the Preacher’s portrait of Madam Bubble which only comes of the artist having mixed his colours, as Milman says that Tacitus mixed his ink, with resentment and with remorse.  Out of His reading of Solomon and Moses and the Prophets on this same subject, as well as out of His own observation and experience, conflict and conquest, our Lord added some strong and deep and inward touches of His own to that well-known picture, and then named it by the New Testament name of the World.  And then, after Him, His longest-lived disciple set forth the same mother and her three daughters under the three names that still stick to them to this day,—­the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.  But it was reserved for John Bunyan to fill up and to finish those outlines of Scripture and to pour over the whole work his own depth and strength of colour, till, altogether, Madam Bubble stands out as yet another masterpiece of our dreamer’s astonishing genius.  Let us take our stand before this heaving canvas, then, till we have taken attentive note of some of John Bunyan’s inimitable touches and strokes and triumphs of truth and art.  “One in very pleasant attire, but old . . .  This woman is a witch . . .  I am the mistress of the world, she said, and men are made happy by me . . .  A tall, comely dame, something of a swarthy complexion.”  In the newly discovered portrait of a woman, by Albert