rse nobody, as Plato says, knows
but the Deity. But the best of us would be hard put to it to make
By-ends reveal his By-endishness more perfectly than he does by his
conversation, and without any ticket-name at all.

Not less remarkable, and only a little less new, is the vividness and
sufficiency of the scene painting and setting. It has been said that
the great novelists not only provide us with a world of friends more
real and enjoyable than the actual folk we know, but also with a world
for those friends to live in, more real and far more enjoyable than the
world in which we ourselves sojourn. And this is well seen of Christian.
The Slough of Despond and the terrible overhanging hill; the gateway and
the Interpreter's House and the House Beautiful; the ups and downs of
the road, and the arbours and the giants' dens: Beulah and the
Delectable Mountains:--one knows them as one knows the country that one
has walked over, and perhaps even better. There is no description for
description's sake: yet nothing is wanting of the descriptive kind.

Yet all these things are--as they should be--only subsidiary to the main
interest of the Pilgrimage itself. Once more, one may fear that it is no
good sign of the wits of the age that readers should be unable to
discard familiarity with the argument of the story. It is the way in
which that argument is worked out and illustrated that is the thing. I
have never myself, since I became thoroughly acquainted with Lydgate's
Englishing of Deguilevile's _Pilgrimage of the Soul of Man_, had any
doubt that--in some way or other, direct or indirect, at tenth or
twentieth hand perhaps--Bunyan was acquainted with it: but this is of no
importance. He might undoubtedly have got all his materials straight out
of the Bible. But his working of them up is all his own, and is
wonderful. Here, to begin with, is the marvel not merely of a
continuation which is not a falling off, but of a repetition of the same
general scheme with different but closely connected personages, which is
entirely free from monotony. One is so accustomed to the facts that
perhaps it hardly strikes one at first how extraordinarily audacious the
attempt is: nay, the very success of it may blind all but critics to
the difficulty. It is no wonder that people tried further continuations
and further complications: still less wonder that they utterly failed.
Probably even Bunyan himself could not have "done it a third time." But
he