of man and the life of God, but the way in which he tells these
things shows innumerable signs of the bright world of English books.

It is worth while to consider this large and human Bunyan, who has been
very erroneously supposed to be a mere literary freak, detached from all
such influences as go to the making of other writers. He tells us,
indeed, that "when I pulled it came," and that is delightfully true.
Yet, it came not out of nowhere, and it is our part in this essay to
inquire as to the places from which it did come. As we have said, it
came out of two worlds, and the web is most wonderfully woven and
coloured, but our present concern is rather with the earthly part of it
than the heavenly.

No one can read John Bunyan without thinking of George Herbert. Few of
the short biographies in our language are more interesting reading than
Isaac Walton's life of Herbert. That master of simplicity is always
fascinating, and in this biography he gives us one of the most beautiful
sketches of contemporary narrative that has ever been penned. Herbert
was the quaintest of the saints. He lived in the days of Charles the
First and James the First, a High Churchman who had Laud for his friend.
Shy, sensitive, high-bred, shrinking from the world, he was at the same
time a man of business, skilful in the management of affairs, and yet a
man of morbid delicacy of imagination. The picture of his life at Little
Gidding, where he and Mr. Farrer instituted a kind of hermitage, or
private chapel of devotion, in which the whole of the Psalms were read
through once in every twenty-four hours, grows peculiarly pathetic when
we remember that the house and chapel were sacked by the parliamentary
army, in which for a time John Bunyan served. No two points of view, it
would seem, could be more widely contrasted than those of Bunyan and
Herbert, and yet the points of agreement are far more important than the
differences between them, and _The Temple_ has so much in common with
the _Pilgrim's Progress_ that one is astonished to find that the
likenesses seem to be entirely unconscious. Matthew Henry is perpetually
quoting _The Temple_ in his Commentary. Writing only a few years
earlier, Bunyan reproduces in his own fashion many of its thoughts, but
does not mention its existence.

In order to know Bunyan's early life, and indeed to understand the
_Pilgrim's Progress_ at all adequately, one must read _Grace Abounding_.
It is a short book, wr