but that Pagan has been dead many a
day. Yet the pagan spirit lives on in many forms, and finds an abiding
place and home in Vanity Fair. As Professor Firth has pointed out, Ben
Jonson, in his play _Bartholomew Fair_, had already told the adventures
of two Puritans who strayed into the Fair, and who regarded the whole
affair as the shop of Satan. There were many other Fairs, such as that
of Sturbridge, and the Elstow Fair itself, which was instituted by the
nuns on the ground close to their convent, and which is held yearly to
the present day. Such Fairs as these have been a source of much
temptation and danger to the neighbourhood, and represent in its popular
form the whole spirit of paganism at its worst.

All the various elements of Bunyan's world live on in the England of
to-day. Thackeray, with a stroke of characteristic genius, has expanded
and applied the earlier conception of paganism in his great novel whose
title _Vanity Fair_ is borrowed from Bunyan. But the main impression of
the allegory is the victory of the spiritual at its weakest over the
temporal at its mightiest. His descriptions of the supper and bed
chamber in the House Beautiful, and of the death of Christiana at the
end of the Second Part, are immortal writings, in the most literal
sense, amid the shows of time. They have indeed laid hold of immortality
not for themselves only, but for the souls of men. Nothing could sum up
the whole story of Bunyan better than the legend of his flute told by
Mr. S.S. M'Currey in his book of poems entitled _In Keswick Vale_. The
story is that in his prison Bunyan took out a bar from one of the chairs
in his cell, scooped it hollow, and converted it into a flute, upon
which he played sweet music in the dark and solitary hours of the prison
evening. The jailers never could find out the source of that music, for
when they came to search his cell, the bar was replaced in the chair,
and there was no apparent possibility of flute-playing; but when the
jailers departed the music would mysteriously recommence. It is very
unlikely that this legend is founded upon fact, or indeed that Bunyan
was a musician at all (although we do have from his pen one touching and
beautiful reference to the finest music in the world being founded upon
the bass), but, like his own greater work, the little legend is an
allegory. The world for centuries has heard sweet music from Bunyan, and
has not known whence it came. It has seemed to most m