f the strong
by local insolence and legal injustice, is supplied by Bunyan with
epithets of immense retaliative force. He is the greatest name-maker
among authors. He was a spiritual Comanche. He prayed like a savage. He
said himself, when describing the art of the religious rhetorician--an
art of which he was the greatest master of his time:--

You see the ways the fisherman doth take
To catch the fish; what engines doth he make!
Behold! how he engageth all his wits,
Also his snares, lines, angles, hooks, and nets;
Yet fish there be that neither hook nor line,
Nor snare, nor net, nor engine can make thine;
They must be grop'd for, and be tickled too,
Or they will not be catch'd, whate'er you do.

Bunyan never tickled the sinner. It was not his way. He carried a prong.
He pricked the erring. He published a pamphlet to suggest what ought to
be done to holy pedestrians, whose difficulties lay rearward. He put
detonating balls under their feet which exploded as they stepped and
alarmed them along. He lined the celestial road with horrors. If they
turned their heads they saw a fiend worse than Lot's wife who was merely
changed into a pillar of sweet all-preserving salt. Bunyan's unfortunate
converts who looked back fell into a pit filled with fire, where they
howled and burnt for evermore.

Ah! with what pleasure must the great Bedfordshire artist have
contemplated his masterly pages as day by day he added to them the
portrait of some new scoundrel, or painted with dexterous and loving
hand the wholesome outlines of some honest man, or devised some new
phrase which like a new note or new colour would delight singer or
painter for generations yet to come. He must have strode proudly along
his cell as he put his praise and his scorn into imperishable similes.

But Bunyan had never been great had he been merely disagreeable. He had
infinite wit in him. It was his carnal genius that saved him. He wrote
sixty books, and two of them--the "Siege of the Town of Mansoul" and the
"Pilgrim's Progress"--exceed all ever written for creative swiftness of
imagination, racy English speech, sentences of literary art, cunningness
in dialogue, satire, ridicule, and surpassing knowledge of the
picturesque ways of the obscure minds of common men. In his pages men
rise out of the ground--they always come up on an open space so that
they can be seen. They talk naturally, so that you know them at once;
and the