ding_, with the
exception of Luther on Galatians, is Foxe's _Book of Martyrs_, traces of
which are unmistakable in such incidents as the trial and death of
Faithful and in other parts.

In these few volumes may be summed up the entire literary knowledge
which Bunyan is known to have possessed. He stands apart from mere
book-learning, and deals with life rather through his eyes and ears
directly than through the medium of books. But then those eyes and ears
of his were no ordinary organs; and his imagination, whose servants they
were, was quick to enlist every vital and suggestive image and idea for
its own uses. Thus the rich store of observation which he had already
laid up through the medium of puppet plays, fragments of song and
popular story, was all at his disposal when he came to need it. Further,
even in his regenerate days, there was no dimming of the imaginative
faculty nor of the observant. The whole neighbourhood in which he lived
was an open book, in which he read the wonderful story of life in many
tragic and comic tales of actual fact; and in the prison where he spent
twelve years, he must often have heard from his fellow-prisoners such
fragments as they knew and remembered, with which doubtless they would
beguile the tedium of their confinement. That would be for the most part
in the first and second imprisonments, extending from the years 1660 to
1672. The third imprisonment was a short affair of only some nine
months, spent in the little prison upon the bridge of Bedford, where
there would be room for very few companions. The modern bridge crosses
the river at almost exactly the same spot; and if you look over the
parapet you may see, when the river is low, traces of what seem to be
the foundations of the old prison bridge.

When we would try to estimate the processes by which the great allegory
was built up, the first fact that strikes us is its extreme aloofness
from current events which must have been very familiar to him. In others
of his works he tells many stories of actual life, but these are of a
private and more or less gossiping nature, many of them fantastic and
grotesque, such as those appalling tales of swearers, drunkards, and
other specially notorious sinners being snatched away by the
devil--narratives which bear the marks of crude popular imagination in
details like the actual smell of sulphur left behind. In the whole
_Pilgrim's Progress_ there is no reference whatever to the Civil Wa