he _Pilgrim's Progress_ must wish to know from whence came
those wonderful word pictures with which the dreamer of Bedford Jail
gems his masterpiece. That phrase "delectable mountains" conjures up in
each individual reader's mind those particular hills wherever they may
be, which are his own peculiar delight, and for which, exiled, his
spirit so ardently longs.

It is not presuming too much to suppose that the scene in Bunyan's mind
was that long range of undulating downs sometimes rising into bold and
arresting shape, and always with their finest aspect toward the Bedford
plains and him who cast longing eyes toward them. From almost any
slight eminence on the south of Bedford town on a clear day the
Dunstable and Ivinghoe hills are to be seen in distant beauty, and
there is the strongest similarity between them and those glorious
summits which every man of Sussex knows and loves so well.

The Chiltern Hills and the South Downs are built up of the same
material, have had their peculiarities of shape and form carved by the
same artificers--rain and frost, sun and wind; their flowers are the
same, and to outward seeming their sons and daughters are the same in
the way that all hill folk are alike and yet all differ in some subtle
way from the dweller in the plains.

Be this so or not our Downs are to us delectable mountains, and let the
reader who scoffs at the noun remember that size is no criterion of
either beauty or sublimity. That Sussex lover and greatest of literary
naturalists, Gilbert White, in perhaps his most frequently quoted
passage so characterizes the "majestic chain"; to his contemporaries
such a description was not out of place; our great grandfathers were
appalled when brought from the calm tranquillity of the southern slopes
to the stern dark melancholy of the mountains of Cumberland and
Westmoreland. The diary descriptions of those timid travellers of the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are full of such
adjectives as "terrible," "frightful," "awful." One unlucky
individual's nerves caused him to stigmatize as "ghastly and
disgusting" one of the finest scenes in the Lake District, probably
unsurpassed in Europe for its perfectly balanced beauty of form and
splendour of colouring. To the general reader of those times the
descriptive poems of Wordsworth were probably unmeaning rhapsodies. Our
ancestors, however, were very fond of "prospects." An old atlas of the
counties of England, publ