rs had compared it, to a pilgrimage. Soon his quick wit discovered
innumerable points of similarity which had escaped his predecessors.
Images came crowding on his mind faster than he could put them into
words, quagmires and pits, steep hills, dark and horrible glens, soft
vales, sunny pastures, a gloomy castle of which the courtyard was strewn
with the skulls and bones of murdered prisoners, a town all bustle and
splendour, like London on the Lord Mayor's Day, and the narrow path,
straight as a rule could make it, running on up hill and down hill,
through city and through wilderness, to the Black River and the Shining
Gate. He had found out, as most people would have said, by accident, as
he would doubtless have said, by the guidance of Providence, where
his powers lay. He had no suspicion, indeed, that he was producing a
masterpiece. He could not guess what place his allegory would occupy in
English literature; for of English literature he knew nothing. Those who
suppose him to have studied the Fairy Queen might easily be confuted, if
this were the proper place for a detailed examination of the passages in
which the two allegories have been thought to resemble each other. The
only work of fiction, in all probability, with which he could compare
his Pilgrim, was his old favourite, the legend of Sir Bevis of
Southampton. He would have thought it a sin to borrow any time from the
serious business of his life, from his expositions, his controversies,
and his lace tags, for the purpose of amusing himself with what he
considered merely as a trifle. It was only, he assures us, at spare
moments that he returned to the House Beautiful, the Delectable
Mountains, and the Enchanted Ground. He had no assistance. Nobody but
himself saw a line, till the whole was complete. He then consulted his
pious friends. Some were pleased. Others were much scandalised. It was
a vain story, a mere romance, about giants, and lions, and goblins, and
warriors, sometimes fighting with monsters and sometimes regaled by fair
ladies in stately palaces. The loose atheistical wits at Will's might
write such stuff to divert the painted Jezebels of the court: but did it
become a minister of the gospel to copy the evil fashions of the world?
There had been a time when the cant of such fools would have made Bunyan
miserable. But that time was passed; and his mind was now in a firm and
healthy state. He saw that, in employing fiction to make truth clear
and goo