imply Devil's
traffic took a tragic view of even the most innocent pleasures, and
applied to himself, on account of his love of strong language, Sunday
sports and bell-ringing, epithets that would hardly have been too strong
if he had committed all the crimes of the latest Bluebeard. He himself,
indeed, seems to have become alarmed when--probably as a result of his own
confessions--it began to be rumoured that he was a man with an unspeakable
past. He now demanded that "any woman in heaven, earth or hell" should be
produced with whom he had ever had relations before his marriage. "My
foes," he declared, "have missed their mark in this shooting at me. I am
not the man. I wish that they themselves be guiltless. If all the
fornicators and adulterers in England were hanged up by the neck till they
be dead, John Bunyan, the object of their envy, would still be alive and
well." Bunyan, one observes, was always as ready to defend as to attack
himself. The verses he prefixed to _The Holy War_ are an indignant reply
to those who accused him of not being the real author of _The Pilgrim's
Progress_. He wound up a fervent defence of his claims to originality by
pointing out the fact that his name, if "anagrammed," made the words: "NU
HONY IN A B." Many worse arguments have been used in the quarrels of
theologians.

Bunyan has been described as a tall, red-haired man, stern of countenance,
quick of eye, and mild of speech. His mildness of speech, I fancy, must
have been an acquired mildness. He loved swearing as a boy, and, as _The
Pilgrim's Progress_ shows, even in his later life he had not lost the
humour of calling names. No other English author has ever invented a name
of the labelling kind equal to that of Mr. Worldly Wiseman--a character,
by the way, who does not appear in the first edition of _The Pilgrim's
Progress_, but came in later as an afterthought. Congreve's "Tribulation
Spintext" and Dickens's "Lord Frederick Verisopht" are mere mechanical
contrivances compared to this triumph of imagination and phrase. Bunyan's
gift for names was in its kind supreme. His humorous fancy chiefly took
that form. Even atheists can read him with pleasure for the sake of his
names. The modern reader, no doubt, often smiles at these names where
Bunyan did not mean him to smile, as when Mrs. Lightmind says: "I was
yesterday at Madam Wantons, when we were as merry as the maids. For who do
you think should be there but I and Mrs. Love-the-fles