that with their extravagant and vivid
suggestions appealed so directly and powerfully to the youthful fancy.

Coleridge says of the "Pilgrim's Progress" that it is the best summary
of evangelical Christianity ever produced by a writer not miraculously
inspired. Froude declares that it has for two centuries affected the
spiritual opinions of the English race in every part of the world more
powerfully than any other book, except the Bible. "It is," says
Macaulay, "perhaps the only book about which, after the lapse of a
hundred years, the educated minority has come over to the opinion of
the common people."

Whether or not Bunyan is, as D'Israeli has called him, the Spenser of
the people, and whether or not his work is the poetry of Puritanism,
the best evidence of the merit of the "Pilgrim's Progress" appears, as
Dr. Johnson has shrewdly pointed out, in the general and continued
approbation of mankind. Southey has critically observed that to his
natural style Bunyan is in some degree beholden for his general
popularity, his language being everywhere level to the most ignorant
reader and to the meanest capacity; "there is a homely reality about
it--a nursery tale is not more intelligible, in its manner of
narration, to a child."

Another cause of his popularity, says Southey, is that he taxes the
imagination as little as the understanding. "The vividness of his own,
which, as history shows, sometimes could not distinguish ideal
impressions from actual ones, occasioned this. He saw the things of
which he was writing as distinctly with his mind's eye as if they were,
indeed, passing before him in a dream."

It is clear to me that in his youth Bunyan would have endeared himself
to me had I lived at that time, for his fancy was of that kind and of
such intensity as I delight to find in youth. "My sins," he tells us,
"did so offend the Lord that even in my childhood He did scare and
affright me with fearful dreams and did terrify me with dreadful
visions. I have been in my bed greatly afflicted, while asleep, with
apprehensions of devils and wicked spirits, who still, as I then
thought, labored to draw me away with them, of which I could never be
rid."

It is quite likely that Bunyan overestimated his viciousness. One of
his ardent, intense temperament having once been touched of the saving
grace could hardly help recognizing in himself the most miserable of
sinners. It is related that upon one occasion he was goi