lah, and the Delectable Mountains, that
earthly Paradise of nature where we might be happy yet, and wander no
farther, if the world would let us--fair mountains in whose streams Izaak
Walton was then even casting angle.

It is pleasant to fancy how Walton and Bunyan might have met and talked,
under a plane tree by the Ouse, while the May showers were falling.
Surely Bunyan would not have likened the good old man to Formalist; and
certainly Walton would have enjoyed travelling with Christian, though the
book was by none of his dear bishops, but by a Non-conformist. They were
made to like but not to convert each other; in matters ecclesiastical
they saw the opposite sides of the shield. Each wrote a masterpiece. It
is too late to praise "The Complete Angler" or the "Pilgrim's Progress."
You may put ingenuity on the rack, but she can say nothing new that is
true about the best romance that ever was wedded to allegory, nor about
the best idyl of old English life.

The people are living now--all the people: the noisy bullying judges, as
of the French Revolutionary Courts, or the Hanging Courts after
Monmouth's war; the demure, grave Puritan girls; and Matthew, who had the
gripes; and lazy, feckless Ignorance, who came to so ill an end, poor
fellow; and sturdy Old Honest, and timid Mr. Fearing; not single persons,
but dozens, arise on the memory.

They come, as fresh, as vivid, as if they were out of Scott or Moliere;
the Tinker is as great a master of character and fiction as the greatest,
almost; his style is pure, and plain, and sound, full of old idioms, and
even of something like old slang. But even his slang is classical.

Bunyan is everybody's author. The very Catholics have their own edition
of the Pilgrim: they have cut out Giant Pope, but have been too
good-natured to insert Giant Protestant in his place. Unheralded,
unannounced, though not uncriticised (they accused the Tinker of being a
plagiarist, of course), Bunyan outshone the Court wits, the learned, the
poets of the Restoration, and even the great theologians.

His other books, except "Grace Abounding" (an autobiography), "The Holy
War," and "Mr. Badman," are only known to students, nor much read by
them. The fashion of his theology, as of all theology, passed away; it
is by virtue of his imagination, of his romance, that he lives.

The allegory, of course, is full of flaws. It would not have been manly
of Christian to run off and save his own so