is so much at home in the Valley of Humiliation that he
kneels down and kisses the flowers in its grass. He is a man who can
never get rid of himself for a moment, and who bores all the company
with his illimitable and anxious introspection. Yet, in Vanity Fair,
when practical facts have to be faced instead of morbid fancies and
inflamed conscience, he is the most valiant of men, whom they can hardly
keep from getting himself killed, and for that matter all the rest of
them. Here, again, is an inimitable flash of insight, where Simple,
Sloth, and Presumption have prevailed with "one Short-Wind, one
Sleepy-Head, and with a young woman, her name was Dull, to turn out of
the way and become as they."

Every now and then these natural touches of portraiture rise to a true
sublimity, as all writing that is absolutely true to the facts of human
nature tends to do. Great-Heart says to Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, "Let me
see thy sword," and when he has taken it in his hand and looked at it
for awhile, he adds, "Ha! it is a right Jerusalem blade." That sword
lingers in Bunyan's imagination, for, at the close of Valiant's life,
part of his dying speech is this "My sword I give to him that shall
succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can
get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me that
I have fought His battles."

Bunyan is so evidently an idealist and a prince of spiritual men, that
no one needs to point out this characteristic of the great dreamer, nor
to advertise so obvious a thing as his spiritual idealism. We have
accordingly taken that for granted and left it to the reader to
recognise in every page for himself. We have sought in this to show what
has sometimes been overlooked, how very human the man and his work are.
Yet his humanism is ever at the service of the spirit, enlivening his
book and inspiring it with a perpetual and delicious interest, but never
for a moment entangling him again in the old yoke of bondage, from which
at his conversion he had been set free. For the human as opposed to the
divine, the fleshly as the rival of the spiritual, he has an open and
profound contempt, which he expresses in no measured terms in such
passages as that concerning Adam the First and Madam Wanton. These are
for him sheer pagans. At the cave, indeed, which his pilgrim visits at
the farther end of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, we read that Pope
and Pagan dwelt there in old time,