d Tom Brown school! If it is not a well of
English undefiled to which the poet as well as the philologist
must repair, if they would drink of the living waters, it is a
clear stream of current English--the vernacular speech of his
age, sometimes indeed in its rusticity and coarseness, but
always in its plainness and its strength. To this natural
style Bunyan is in some degree beholden for his general
popularity;--his language is every where level to the must
ignorant reader, and to the meanest capacity: there is a
homely reality about it; a nursery tale is not more
intelligible, in its manner of narration, to a child. Another
cause of his popularity is, that he taxes the imagination as
little as the understanding. The vividness of his own, which,
as his history shows, sometimes could not distinguish ideal
impressions from actual ones, occasioned this. He saw the
things of which he was writing as distinctly with his mind's
eye as if they were indeed passing before him in a dream. And
the reader perhaps sees them more satisfactorily to himself,
because the outline only of the picture is presented to him;
and the author having made no attempt to fill up the details,
every reader supplies them according to the measure and scope
of his own intellectual and imaginative powers."

Mr. Southey, observing with what general accuracy this apostle of the
people writes the English language, notwithstanding all the
disadvantages under which his youth must have been passed, pauses to
notice one gross and repeated error. 'The vulgarism alluded to,' says
the laureate, 'consists in the almost uniform use of _a_ for
_have_--never marked as a contraction, e.g. might _a_ made me take
heed--like to _a_ been smothered.' Under favour, however, this is a
sin against orthography rather than grammar: the tinker of Elstow only
spelt according to the pronunciation of the verb _to have_, then
common in his class; and the same form appears a hundred times in
Shakspeare. We must not here omit to mention the skill with which Mr.
Southey has restored much of Bunyan's masculine and idiomatic English,
which had been gradually dropped out of successive impressions by
careless, or unfaithful, or what is as bad, conceited correctors of
the press.

The speedy popularity of the Pilgrim's Progress had the natural effect
of inducing Bunyan again to indulge the vein of allegory