keenly the genial fibre of his nature, — its homely earnest- ness, its imaginative ardor, its bluff wholesome humor, its capacity for brotherhood and common helpfulness.
II.
In the rough verses which he prefixed to The Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan tells us that the allegory came into exist- ence almost by chance. During his imprisonment, while engaged upon a sombre controversial work, he hit upon the old simile which compares the progressive stages of Chris- tian experience to a pilgrimage. His eager fancy seized upon the figure and began to unfold the analogies which lay concealed in it. As he wrote, the trite image flowered under his hand until it bade fair to "eat out," as he says, the sober polemic in which it was imbedded. Accordingly he removed it from its setting and amused his spare hours by following out the fancies which now crowded faster than he could express them. On his release from prison, with some misgivings he published the little book, prefacing it with an apology for its seeming vanity and lightness. It was indeed a singular book to drop into that dun-colored, ascetic, sourly righteous Puritan world. Under cover of a didactic pur- pose, it brought to that gloomy world the most enchanting mixture of fairy-tale, novel, and adventurous romance. It presented to the simple Bedfordshire cottagers their own inmost convictions, their own most earnest strivings, not in the abstractions of the day, but in glowing pictures con- crete as their own field-flowers, yet bathed inexplicably in the delicate effulgence of dream. Not only was Chris- tian's journey, in a spiritual sense, the one on which they were engaged, but the physical world in which the pilgrim moved was, in many respects, the very countryside they knew. This narrow road, going straight as the bird flies over hill and dale, from the " Wicket-gate " to the Land of Beulah and the Celestial City, was bordered by sights de- lightfully familiar. The Slough of Despond was just the
