ostentatiously disposed than the arms of the first cavalier, seem ready for the same purposes; and he, therefore, is repulsed, as well as his neighbour. These are the only passages in which the church dignitary might be thought to have caught for a moment the spirit of the tinker of Bedford. Through the rest of his parable, which fills a wellsized quarto volume, the dean no doubt evinces considerable learning, but, compared to Bunyan, may rank with the dullest of all possible doctors; a worthy neighbour, indeed, and a marvellous good bowler, but for Alexander, you see how 'tis." Yet Dr Patrick had the applause of his own time. The first edition of his Parable appeared, as has been mentioned, in 1678; and the sixth, which now lies before us, is dated 1687.1 Mr Southey introduces the following just eulogium on our classic of the common people: 66 says, 'Bunyan was confident in his own powers of expression; he thine only way Before them all, is to say out thy say In thine own native language, which no man And he might well be confident in it. His is a homespun style, not a manufactured one: and what a difference is there between its homeliness, and the flippant vulgarity of the Roger L'Estrange and 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 The Poet Laureat may, perhaps, like to hear that Dr Patrick introduces into his parable a very tolerable edition of that legend of the roasted fowls recalled to life by St James of Compostella, of which he himself has recently given us so lively and amusing a metrical version. 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 most 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."-Pp. lxxxviii. lxxxix. It may be added, to these judicious remarks, that the most pleasing occupation of the fine arts being to awaken and excite the imagination, sketches in drawing, simple melodies in music, a bold, decisive, but light-touched strain of poetry or narrative in literary composition (like what is called in the green-room the touch and go method of acting), will always be more likely to gain extensive popularity than any more highly-wrought performance, which aspires to afford the mind no exercise save that of admiration, which pretends at once to rouse curiosity by the outline, and to satiate it by distinct, accurate circumstantiality of detail. To understand this, we need only remember having been the visiter of some celebrated scene of natural beauty, under the close guardianship of a pragmatical guide, who will let you find out nothing independent of him, and is so anxious that you should leave nothing unseen, that he makes you almost wish yourself both deaf and blind, that you may neither hear his instructions nor profit by them. The true rule of grace in description and narrative-the ne quid nimis-is one which genius often neglects in its pride of luxuriance, and seldom without paying the penalty in popular opinion. It is not, however, the words and manner of the Pilgrim's Progress alone which have raised that singular allegory to so high a rank among our general readers. The form and style of composition is safely referred to the highest authority— "WHO spake in parables, I dare not say, But sure He knew it was a pleasing way." And, without dwelling on the precedent suggested by the poet, we may observe how often the allegory, or parable, has gained, without suspicion, those passes of the human heart which were vigilantly guarded against the direct force of truth by selfinterest, prejudice, or pride. When the prophet approached the sinful monarch with the intention of reproving his murder and adultery, a direct annun→ ciation of his purpose might have awakened the king to wrath, instead of that penitence to which it was the will of Heaven that he should be invited. But David listened unsuspectingly to the parable of the ewe-lamb; and it was not till the awful words" Thou art the man"-were uttered, that he found the crime which he had so readily condemned was, in fact, the type of that which he had himself committed. In this respect, the comparing the parable with the real facts which it intimates, is like the practice of the artists to examine the reflec tion of their paintings in a mirror, that they may get clear of false lights and shadows, and judge of their compositions more accurately by seeing them presented under a change of light and circumstan ces. But, besides the moral uses of this species of composition, it has much in it to exercise those faculties of the human mind which it is most agreeable to keep in motion. Our judgment is engaged in weighing and measuring the points of similarity between the reality and the metaphor as these evolve themselves, and fancy is no less amused by the unexpected, surprising, and, we may even say, the witty turns of thought, through means of which associations are produced between things which, in themselves, seemed diametrically opposed and irreconcilable, but which the allegorist has contrived should nevertheless illustrate each other. In some cases, the parable possesses the interest of the riddle itself; the examination and solution of which are so interesting to the human intellect, that the history and religious doctrines of ancient nations were often at once preserved and disguised in the form of such ænigmata. In a style of composition, rendered thus venerable by its antiquity, and still more so by the purposes to which it has been applied, John Bunyan, however uneducated, was a distinguished master. For our part, we are inclined to allow him, in the simplicity of his story, and his very shrewdness, and, if the reader pleases, homely bluntness of style, a superiority over the great poet to whom he has been compared by D'Israeli,—which, considering both writers as allegorists, may, in some respect, counterbalance the advantages of a mind fraught with education, a head full of poetic flight and grace —in a word, the various, the unutterable distinction between the friend of Sidney and of Raleigh, the fascinating poet of fairy land, and our obscure tinker of Elstow, the self-erected holder-forth to the Anabaptists of Bedford. Either has told a tale expressive of the progress of religion and morality -Spenser's under the guise of a romance of chivalry, while that of Bunyan recalls the outline of a popular fairy tale, with its machinery of giants, dwarfs, and enchanters. So far they resemble each other; and if the later writer must allow the earlier the advantage of a richer imagination, and a taste incalculably more cultivated, the uneducated man of the people may, in return, claim over Spenser the superiority due to a more simple and better concocted plan, from which he has suffered no temptation to lead him astray. This will appear more evident, if we observe that Spenser (the first book, perhaps, excepted, where he has traced, in the adventures of the Redcross Knight, with considerable accuracy, the history and changes of the Christian world) has, in other cantos, suffered his story to lead him astray from his moral, and engages his knights, by whom we are to understand the abstract virtues, in tilts and tournaments, not to be easily reconciled with the explanation of the allegory. What are we to understand by Britomart overthrowing Arthegal, if we regard the lady as the representative of chas |