self. The history of the Pilgrim is his own history. The varied experiences of Christiana and her children, her sweet companion 'young Mercy,' are such as he had witnessed around him in the members of Mr. Gifford's church. And it is this which breathes

life into every line. He was not evolving a shadowy career out of his own inner consciousness-a dead abstraction of what might be or ought to be—but pourtraying what he had himself known and felt.

The scenery and surroundings of his allegory, except when borrowed from the great repertory of the Bible, are also such as he had grown up amidst in his native county, or had seen in his tinker's wanderings. 'Born and bred,' writes Kingsley, 'in the monotonous midland, he has no natural images beyond the pastures and brooks, the town and country houses he saw about him.' Bunyan was a man of keen perception, and described what he saw with a homely graphic power; but whenever he had to draw on his own resources his pictures are frigid and formal. His mind was probably insensible to the higher types of beauty and grandeur in nature. All his nobler imagery is taken from Scripture; 'There is scarcely a circumstance or metaphor in the Old Testament which does not find a place bodily and literally in the Pilgrim's Progress, and this has made his imagination appear more creative than it really is ''

We notice also this superiority of the descriptive to the creative faculty in the dramatis personae of his book. With all their distinctness-no two alike, and each with their individual traits of manner and language, which stamp them as living persons, not mere lay-figures named and ticketed-there is not one we can think of as the creation of his own mind. They are English men and women of his own time. He had seen and known every one of them. Bold personifications as they are, and to some extent exaggerated types of some leading vice or virtue, they are not mere pale shadows, like the characters in most allegories, but beings of flesh and blood like ourselves. We may be sure that they were all well known in Bunyan's own circle. He could have given a personal name to every one, and we could do the same to many. Dean Stanley says most truly, 'We as well as he

have met with Mr. Byends and Mr. Facing-both-ways, and Mr. Talkative. Some of us perhaps have seen Mr. Nogood and Mr. Liveloose, Mr. Hatelight, and Mr. Implacable. All of us have at times been like Mr. Ready-to-Halt, Mr. Feeblemind and Faintheart, Noheart, and Slowpace, Shortwind, and the young woman whose name was Dull.'

The descriptive touches of person and bearing, in which Bunyan so much excels, make these characters still more real to us. We can see poor Feeblemind, with his 'whitely look, the cast in his eye,' and his trembling speech, and Madam Bubble, 'tall and of a swarthy complexion,' and Littlefaith, 'as white as a clout' when the thieves were on him, and ' Ready-to-Halt' coming along on his crutches, and Demas 'gentlemanlike' standing to call passers by to' come and see.' It is this intimate knowledge of human life and human nature that gives Bunyan his great power to rivet and to charm. But it is human life and human nature in their ordinary every-day guise. Of those 'complexities and contradictions of the human heart which we are now so fond of trying to unravel,' as Kingsley says, he takes very little note. They were probably too subtle for his apprehension.

Bunyan's genius in indicating character and his command of his mother-tongue are nowhere more apparent than in the happily chosen designations given to his personages and their dwellingplaces. The name of the man himself, of his parents, of his relations and of his home, set him before us in a few masterly touches. Even if they only appear incidentally in the narrative, quitting the stage as soon as they have been brought upon it, the features of each are so marked that they leave an indelible impression. Who can forget 'Temporary, who dwelt in Graceless, two miles off of Honesty, next door to one Turnback' -or 'Talkative, the son of one Saywell, who dwelt in Prating Row' or 'Beelzebub's friend Sir Having Greedy,' and 'Turnaway, that dwelt in the town of Apostacy,' and 'Valiant-for-theTruth, born in Darkland, where his father and mother still were'? But Bunyan's masterpiece in characteristic nomenclature is Mr. Byends, with his relatives and associates. If he had not spoken a word we should have known all about the man that came from 'the town of Fairspeech, the Parson of which, Mr. Twotongues, was his mother's own brother by fathers' side,'

who claimed kindred with 'my Lord Turnabout, my Lord Timeserver, Mr. Smoothman and Mr. Anything,' and 'went to school at one Mr. Gripeman's of Lovegain, a market-town in the county of Coveting,' and had 'Hold-the-world, Moneylove and Saveall' as his schoolfellows, and whose wife was 'my Lady Feigning's daughter,' and his grandfather 'a waterman looking one way and rowing another.' A man of such antecedents we are sure would be zealous for religion when he went in his silver slippers, when the sun shines and the people applaud him,' and would be equally ready to go and dig with Demas in his silver-mine underneath Hill Lucre, and never be seen in the way again.'

6

It would be a thankless office to point out the imperfections which attach to the Pilgrim's Progress, as to all human compositions. We may acquiesce in the soundness of Hallam's judgement, that 'in the conduct of the romance no rigorous attention to the conduct of the allegory seems to have been preserved'; that it is difficult to say why certain events occur where they do ; that 'Vanity Fair and the Cave of the two Giants might for anything we see have been placed elsewhere.' We may not be insensible to circumstantial incongruities-for instance Faithful's being carried up to the Heavenly City in the middle of the pilgrimage without crossing the River of Death, and Hopeful's joining Christian midway on, having never passed through the Wicket-gate, or lost his burden at the foot of the Cross. We may see a want of exact correspondence between the First and Second Parts-that that which is a mere 'wicket-gate' in the one is a considerable building with a 'summer parlour' in the otherthat the 'Shepherds' tents' on the 'Delectable Mountains' have given place to a ' Palace' with a 'Dining Room' and a 'Looking Glass,' and a store of jewels; we may wonder at the change in the aspect and the town of Vanity, where Christiana and her family settle down comfortably, enjoying the society of the good people of the place, and the sons marry and have children. We may be offended at the want of keeping which in the course of a supposed journey converts Christiana's sweet babes, who are terrified at the dog at the Wicket-gate, and 'plash the boughs' for the plums, and cry at having to climb the hill; whose faces are 'stroked' by the Interpreter; who are catechized and called

"good boys' by Prudence; who sup on 'bread crumbled into basins of milk,' and are put to bed by Mercy—into 'young men and strong,' able to go out and fight with a giant and give a hand to the destruction of Doubting Castle, and becoming husbands and fathers. We may not be insensible to some grave theological deficiencies, the slight recognition of the value of corporate union, and of the Church as a living society; the scanty allusions to the Lord's Supper as a means of grace, and the entire ignoring of the Sacrament of Baptism; and above all the omission, save once, of reference to the work of the Holy Ghost. But these are but motes in the sunbeam, defects inseparable from every work of native genius, which we could ill afford to exchange for the tame accuracy of the schools. 'If you were to polish it,' writes Coleridge, 'you would destroy at once the reality of the vision.'

The text of the Pilgrim's Progress in the present reprint is, in all essential points, that of the second edition of the First Part, and of the first edition of the Second Part, published respectively in 1678 and 1684.

For a long time it was believed that no single copy of the first edition of the First Part was extant. At last one was found in the possession of R. S. Holford, Esq., which has served as the basis of several reprints. It was first issued in 1847 by the Hanserd Knollys Society, under the careful editorship of Mr. George Offor. In this painstaking edition the original is exactly followed 'in the orthography, capitals, italics, and punctuation.' The additions made in the second edition-which include the whole episodes of Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and of Mrs. Diffidence, with most of that of Byends; the touching conversation at the House Beautiful between Charity and Christian with regard to his family, and that of Evangelist with Christian and Faithful as they approach Vanity Fair, the pillar of Lot's wife at the Hill Lucre, the trumpeting and bell-ringing at the Celestial City, and the name of the Hill Difficulty-are distinguished by Mr. Offor with inverted commas; and every omission or alteration made by the author during his lifetime is accurately noted. Since the appearance of this edition, another with a very carefully corrected text has been issued by Messrs. Macmillan, in the 'Golden Treasury' series, under the editorship of the Rev. H. Bothamley. Two literal reprints have also been published by Mr. Elliot Stock,

the first with and the second without the portions added in Bunyan's Second Edition.

The editions named will enable any who desire to do so to make themselves acquainted with the Pilgrim's Progress exactly as it issued from the press in Bunyan's lifetime. Literal accuracy has not been sought for in the present edition. The object of the series of which it forms part is not to reproduce archaeological curiosities, but to present some of the chief works of our leading authors in a form which will throw no needless obstacles in the way of the less advanced students of English literature. Pedantic fidelity to the original text would have impeded the progress of the student without any advantage to the philologist. As a rule the spelling of the second edition, which shows a very decided improvement upon that of the first, has been followed. The first edition, which had been probably printed from Bunyan's own rude manuscript, written in prison, with some slight corrections from an editor hardly better educated than himself, abounds with orthographical irregularities, which are generally amended in the second edition. It is interesting to notice, as indicating an epoch in our spelling, that 'then' (the constant form in James I's Bible, the present Authorized Version), which appears uniformly in the first edition, has been as uniformly changed into 'than' in the second.

In the Second Part the orthography of the original edition of 1684 (reprinted by Mr. Offor from a copy formerly belonging to Mr. Lea Wilson) has been generally followed. The spelling here is usually more correct than in the First Part. There are, however, some singular exceptions, among which we may notice 'farewel,' 'Hil,' 'Selfwil,' 'paradice,' 'thorow' for "through,' and the use of 'bin' for 'been.' This last is akin to that 'vulgarism of diction,' as Southey terms it, which, generally altered in the second edition of the First Part, has held its place in the Second Part, the uniform use of a for have, never marked as a contraction; e.g. 'I thought you would a come in,' 'What could you a done to a helped yourself?' This, which Sir W. Scott calls 'a sin against orthography rather than grammar,' occurring a hundred times in Shakespeare, has been uniformly preserved. In conclusion, it may be said that while religiously preserving the text unaltered, the rule has been to adopt the