My Pilgrim’s book has travelled sea and land;
    Yet could I never come to understand
    That it was slighted, or turned out of door
    By any kingdom, were they rich or poor. 
    In France, and Flanders, where men kill each other
    My Pilgrim is esteemed a friend, a brother. 
    In Holland too, ’tis said, as I am told,
    My Pilgrim is with some worth more than gold;
    Highlanders and wild Irish can agree
    My Pilgrim should familiar with them be. 
    ’Tis in New England under such advance,
    Receives there so much loving countenance,
    As to be trimmed, new clothed, and decked with gems,
    That it may show its features and its limbs. 
    Yet more, so public doth my Pilgrim walk,
    That of him thousands daily sing and talk.

Notices of Bunyan.

This wonderful book, [the Pilgrim’s Progress,] while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it.  Dr. Johnson, all whose studies were desultory, and who hated, as he said, to read books through, made an exception in favor of the Pilgrim’s Progress.  That work, he said, was one of the two or three which he wished longer.  In every nursery the Pilgrim’s Progress is a greater favorite than Jack the Giant-killer.  Every reader knows the strait and narrow path as well as he knows a road in which he has gone backward and forward a hundred times.  This is the highest miracle of genius—­that things which are not should be as though they were, that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another.  Cowper said, forty or fifty years ago, that he dared not name John Bunyan in his verse, for fear of moving a sneer.  We live in better times; and we are not afraid to say, that though there were many clever men in England during the latter half of the seventeenth century, there were only two great creative minds.  One of those minds produced the Paradise Lost, the other the pilgrim’s progress.

The style of Bunyan is delightful to every reader, and invaluable as a study to every person who wishes to obtain a wide command over the English language.  The vocabulary is the vocabulary of the common people.  There is not an expression, if we except a few technical terms of theology, which would puzzle the rudest peasant.  We have observed several pages which do not contain a single word of more than two syllables.  Yet no writer has said more exactly what he meant to say.  For magnificence, for pathos, for vehement exhortation, for subtle disquisition, for every purpose of the poet, the orator, and the divine, this homely dialect, the dialect of plain working-men, was sufficient.  There is no book in our literature on which we could so readily stake the fame of the old unpolluted English language—­no book which shows so well how rich that language is in its own proper wealth, and how little it has been improved by all that it has borrowed.  T. B. Macaulay—­Essays.