oise
So pleasing unto none as girls and boys,
The Formalist we may compare her to,
For he doth suck our eggs and sing Cuckoo."

A perusal of this little volume with its roughness and quaintness,
sometimes grating on the ear but full of strong thought and picturesque
images, cannot fail to raise Bunyan's pretensions as a poet. His muse,
it is true, as Alexander Smith has said, is a homely one. She is "clad
in russet, wears shoes and stockings, has a country accent, and walks
along the level Bedfordshire roads." But if the lines are unpolished,
"they have pith and sinew, like the talk of a shrewd peasant," with the
"strong thought and the knack of the skilled workman who can drive by a
single blow the nail home to the head."

During his imprisonment Bunyan's pen was much more fertile in prose than
in poetry. Besides his world-famous "Grace Abounding," he produced
during the first six years of his gaol life a treatise on prayer,
entitled "Praying in the Spirit;" a book on "Christian Behaviour,"
setting forth with uncompromising plainness the relative duties of
husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants, by which
those who profess a true faith are bound to show forth its reality and
power; the "Holy City," an exposition of the vision in the closing
chapters of the Book of Revelation, brilliant with picturesque
description and rich in suggestive thought, which, he tells us, had its
origin in a sermon preached by him to his brethren in bonds in their
prison chamber; and a work on the "Resurrection of the Dead and Eternal
Judgment." On these works we may not linger. There is not one of them
which is not marked by vigour of thought, clearness of language, accuracy
of arrangement, and deep spiritual experience. Nor is there one which
does not here and there exhibit specimens of Bunyan's picturesque
imaginative power, and his command of forcible and racy language. Each
will reward perusal. His work on "Prayer" is couched in the most exalted
strain, and is evidently the production of one who by long and agonizing
experience had learnt the true nature of prayer, as a pouring out of the
soul to God, and a wrestling with Him until the blessing, delayed not
denied, is granted. It is, however, unhappily deformed by much ignorant
reviling of the Book of Common Prayer. He denounces it as "taken out of
the papistical mass-book, the scraps and fragments of some popes, some
friars, and I know not wh