literature know that remarkable and delicious paper? The Messrs. Bagster
should secure that paper and should issue an _edition de luxe_ of their
neglected "Bunyan," with Mr. Stevenson's paper for a preface and
introduction. Bagster's "Illustrated Bunyan," with an introduction on
the illustrations by Mr. Louis Stevenson, if I am not much mistaken,
would sell by the thousand.

5. Lord Rosebery knows books and loves books, and he has called
attention to the surpassing beauty of the English in the deathbed scenes
of the _Pilgrim's Progress_. And every lover of pure, tender, and noble
English must, like the Foreign Secretary, have all those precious pages
by heart. Were it not that we all have a cowardly fear at death
ourselves, and think it wicked and cruel even to hint at his approaching
death even to a fast-dying man, we would never let any of our friends lie
down on his sick-bed without having a reassuring and victorious page of
the _Pilgrim_ read to him every day. If the doctors would allow me, I
would have these heavenly pages reprinted in sick-bed type for all my
people. But I am afraid at the doctors. And thus one after another of
my people passes away without the fortification and the foretaste that
the deathbeds of Christian, and Christiana, and Hopeful, and Mr. Fearing,
and Mr. Feeble-mind, and Mr. Honest, and Mr. Standfast would most surely
have given to them. Especially the deathbed, if I must so call it, of
Mr. Standfast. But as Christiana said nothing that could be heard to Mr.
Standfast about his or her latter end, but just looked into his eyes and
gave him her ring, so I may not be able to say all that is in my heart
when your doctor is standing close by. But you will understand what I
would fain say, will you not? You will remember, and will have this
heavenly book read to you alternately with your Bible, will you not? Even
the most godless doctor will give way to you when you tell him that you
know as well as he does just how it is with you, and that you are to have
your own way for the last time. I know a doctor who first forbade her
minister and her family to tell his patient that she was dying, and at
the same time told them to take away from her bedside all such alarming
books as the _Pilgrim's Progress_ and the _Saint's Rest_, and to read to
her a reassuring chapter out of _Old Mortality_ and _Pickwick_.

It will, no doubt, put the best-prepared of us into a deep muse, as it
put Standfas