ground, "built by the Lord of the Hill for the relief and security of pilgrims;" and the porter, Watchful, is standing at the door. The following lines are under this picture "Difficulty is behind, Fear is before, Tho' he's got on the hill the lions roar: Page 53 (p. 49 in my copy) contains the sixth picture, representing Christian retracing his steps to the arbour on the side of the Hill Difficulty, where he recovered his roll, which he had lost. Over the arbour is written, "Here Christian slept, and dropt his roll." Beneath the picture are the following lines: "Shall they who wrong begin yet rightly end? Shall they at all have safety for their friend? No, no; in headstrong manner they set out, And headlong will they fall at last no doubt." Page 66 in my copy contains the picture, representing Christian fully armed leaving the palace called Beautiful. At the foot of the picture are the following lines : "Whilst Christian is among his godly friends, Their golden mouths make him sufficient mends For all his griefs; and when they let him go, He's clod with northern steel from top to toe." Page 70 (p. 73 in my copy) contains the seventh picture, representing the conclusion of Christian's battle with Apollyon. The following lines are at the foot of it : "A more unequal match can hardly be, Christian must fight an angel; but you see The valiant man, by handling sword and shield, Doth make him, tho' a dragon, quit the field." Page 75 (p. 78 in my copy) contains the eighth picture, representing the Valley of the Shadow of Death, with Christian passing through it. The following lines are under this picture : : "Poor man! where art thou now? thy day is night. Good man, be not cast down, thou yet art right. Thy way to Heaven lies by the gates of Hell: Cheer up, hold out, with thee it shall go well." "Now Faithful, play the inan, speak for thy God: Fear not the wicked's malice nor their rod: Page 121 (p. 122 in my copy) contains the eleventh picture, reprein flames at the senting Faithful stake, and also ascending in a chariot of fire. The following lines are under this picture : "Brave Faithful! bravely done in word and deed. Judge, witnesses and jury, have, instead Of overcoming thee, but shown their rage; When they are dead thou 'It live from age to age." Page 142 (p. 144 in my copy) contains the twelfth picture, which represents Doubting-Castle, and Christian and Hopeful imprisoned in it, for having wandered into a more easy road; and Giant Despair is standing at the door, with a club in his hand. The following lines are under this picture : "The Pilgrims now to gratifie the flesh, Will seek its ease, but, oh! how they afresh Do thereby plunge themselves new griefs into! Who seek to please the flesh, themselves undo." Page 150 (p. 152 in my copy) contains the thirteenth picture, representing the pilgrims on the Delectable Mountains, greeted by the shepherds. The following lines are under it : "Mountains delectable they now ascend, Where shepherds be, which to them do commend Alluring things, and things that cautions are; Pilgrims are steady, kept by faith and fear." Page 196 (p. 200 in my copy) contains the fourteenth, or last, picture; representing Christian and Hopeful passing the River of Death, with two angels standing on the shore to receive them. The following lines are under the picture : "Now, now look how the holy Pilgrims ride, Clouds are their chariots, angels are their guide! Who would not here for him all hazards run, That thus provides for his, when this world's done?" The narrative then proceeds to the end of the 204th page, to the concluding words,-" So I awoke, and behold it was a dream;" but the last leaf is torn out, which Mr. Allies supposes contained the Epilogue, which the author wrote on the conclusion of the first part of the work, commencing with, "Now, reader, I have told my dream to thee," &c. The back of each picture is covered with the letter-press, as is the case in the edition which I possess, which is not the first or second edition, but certainly is not later than the third or fourth. The rapidity with which these editions succeeded one another, and the demand for pictures to illustrate them, are not the only proofs of the popularity which the "Pilgrim's Progress" obtained, before the Second Part was published. In the verses prefixed to that part, Bunyan complains of dishonest imitators, "Some have of late to counterfeit My Pilgrim, to their own, my title set; Yea others half my name, and title too, Have stitched to their books, to make them do." "Only one of these," says Dr. Southey, "has fallen in my way; for it is by accident only that books of this perishable kind, which have no merit of their own to preserve them, are to be met with; and this has no other relation to the First than in its title, which was probably a trick of the publishers." This spurious production is entitled, "The Second Part of the Pilgrim's Progress, from this present World of Wickedness and Misery, to an Eternity of Holiness and Felicity, exactly described under the Similitude of a Dream, relating the Manner and Occasion of his setting out from, and difficult and dangerous Journey through, the World, and safe Arrival at last to eternal Happiness. "They were Strangers and Pilgrims on Earth, but they desired a better Country, that is an Heavenly.' Heb. xi. 13, 16. Let us lay aside every weight, and the Sin that doth so easily beset us, and run with patience the race that is set before us.' Heb. xii. 1. "London, printed for Thomas Malthus, at the Sun, in the Poultry, 1683." Such interlopers as these most probably furnished Bunyan with a powerful motive to prepare a Second Part himself. The first edition of this production is in my possession : it appeared in 1684, with the following notice on the back of the title page : "I APPOINT Mr. Nathaniel Ponder, but no other, to print this book. "JOHN BUNYAN. "January 1, 1684." No additions or alterations were made in this Part, though the author lived more than four years after its publication. In the edition of the First Part, published under the auspices of Dr. Southey, a few years ago, he was enabled to institute a collation with the earliest attainable copies; and, in many places, to restore good old vernacular English, which had been injudiciously altered, or carelessly corrupted. This he has effected in the Second Part; but in this instance Dr. Southey had the first edition, which had not been inspected, either in manuscript, or while passing through the press, by any person capable of correcting it. It is plain that Bunyan had willingly availed himself of such corrections in the First Part; and, therefore, it would have been improper to have restored a certain vulgarism of diction in the Second, which the editor of the folio edition had amended.* "The style of Bunyan is homespun, not manufactured," as the Poet Laureate observed; "and hence the difference which exists 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, in its rusticity and coarseness, but always in its plainness and in its strength. To this natural style Bunyan is, in some degree, beholden for his general popularity: his language is everywhere 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 attempts to fill up the details, every reader supplies them according to the measure and scope of his own intellectual and imaginative powers." It is not surprising that, while Bunyan's success was raising a swarm of servile imitators, he should be accused of being an imitator himself. To this charge he alluded in those characteristic rhymes which are prefixed to his "Holy War." *The vulgarism alluded to 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." "Some say the Pilgrim's Progress is not mine, Insinuating as if I would shine In name and fame by the worth of another, Like some made rich by robbing of their brother. "Or that so fond I am of being Sire, "It came from mine own heart, so to my head "Manner and matter too was all mine own; By books, by wits, by tongues, or hand, or pen Add five words to it, or wrote half a line "Alas for this thine eye is now upon, The matter in this manner came from none But the same heart and head, fingers and pen, As did the other. Witness all good men. "I wrote not this of any ostentation; "JOHN BUNYAN." It is acknowledged, that although Bunyan believed his work to be strictly an original one, the same allegory had often been treated before him. It is not impossible but some of these preceding works might have fallen in his way, by which his own conceptions might have been imperceptibly modified. Mr. Montgomery, in his "Introductory Essay to the Pilgrim's Progress," observes, 'that a poem entitled the Pilgrimage,' in Whitney's Emblems, and the emblem which accompanies it, may have suggested to him the first idea of his story; indeed, he says, if he had had Whitney's picture before him, he could not more accurately have copied it in words." A writer in the Quarterly Review (vol. xliii., p. 482) mentions a work in English, of Bunyan's own time, from which the general notion of his allegory might have been taken. The work alluded to is entitled, "The Parable of the Pilgrim, written to a Friend, by Symon Patrick, D.D., Dean of Peterborough," after wards successively Bishop of Chichester and Ely. It was published in 4to., in London, about the year 1672. Bunyan would, however, have scorned to borrow any thing from a Dean; while Dr. Patrick, had he seen the "Pilgrim's Progress," would have spurned, in the pride of academic learning, the very idea of adopting it as a model. Dr. Southey thinks that Bunyan had seen Bernard's "Isle of Man, or the legal Proceedings in Manshire against Sin; wherein, by way of a continued Allegory, the chief Malefactors disturbing both Church and Commonwealth are detected and attached; with their Arraignment and judicial Trial, according to the Laws of England." This was a popular book in Bunyan's time, printed in a cheap form for general sale, and "to be sold by most booksellers." The sixteenth edition was published in 1683. There is as much wit in it as in the "Pilgrim's Progress ;" and it is that vein of wit which Bunyan has worked with such good success.* A paragraph appeared in a London journal a few years ago, charging Bunyan with a direct and knavish plagiarism; asserting that he was not the author, but merely a translator, of the "Pilgrim's Progress;" and that the work had been published in French, Spanish, and Dutch, and other languages, before Bunyan saw it. This was proved by Dr. Southey and Mr. Montgomery to be a notorious falsehood. The book in question is entitled, the "Pilgrimage of Dovekin * Bishop Womack followed Bernard's wit in his "Examination of Tilenus," a tract which has been reprinted in Nichols's "Calvinism and Arminianism compared;" "a work," says Dr. Southey, "of more research concerning the age of James and Charles the First, than any other in our language." and Willekin to their Beloved in Jerusalem," which the Laureate examined; and declares, "That the Pilgrim's Progress' was not a translation from the work, the writer of the slander must have known; for the pilgrims in the prints are women; and that it required no knowledge of Dutch to perceive that the book is written not as a narrative, but in a series of dialogues. If ever there was a work," continues Dr. Southey, "which carried with it the stamp of originality in all its parts, it is that of John Bunyan." Mr. Reader, in a recent coinmunication to the Gentleman's Magazine, adverts to another document in which a general resemblance to the "Pilgrim's Progress" has been discovered. William de Guilleville, a Monk of Chanliz, composed in French metre, in 1310, The Pilgrimage of human Life;" then followed his "Pilgrimage of the Soul," and the "Pilgrimage of Jesus Christ;" which latter bears the date of 1358. The work was called, Le Romant des trois Pélerinaiges; and is supposed by Mr. Reader to have been the parent of Patrick's "Parable of the Pilgrim," and Richard Bernard's "Isle of Man." Mr. Reader possesses an illuminated MS. vellum copy of the French metrical romance of the "Three Pilgrimages," by Guilleville; but nearly one-half of the Pilgrimage of human Life" is lost: a defect which might be supplied from a copy in the British Museum. Among the Cecil мss. at HatfieldHouse, belonging to the Marquis of Salisbury, is "Y Dreme of ye Pilgrimage of ye Soule, translated out of Frensch into Englisch, w som addicion, ye yer of our Lord M. iiii and Prittene" (1413). The late Mr. Hone, in his "Ancient Mysteries described," says, that the "Pilgrimage of the Soul" was printed by Caxton, in 1483. Dr. Dibdin says, that the work from which Caxton's is a translation was a prose composition of Gallôpes, from the original French rhyme of Guilleville. Caxton's volume, in the British Museum, details the numerous sin 62 gular incidents which are presumed The "Pilgrim's Progress" has more than once been done into verse; but I have only heard of the First Part having been so transformed. It was printed by R. Tookey, and to be sold by the booksellers of London and Westminster. An experiment was also tried upon the original work, by altering the names, and publishing it under the title of " The Progress of the Pilgrim." Evangelist is called "GoodNews;" Worldly-Wiseman, “Mr. Politic-Worldly;" Legality, "Mr. Law-do," &c. Dr. Southey imagines this to have been a device of some knavish bookseller for evading the laws which protect literary property, and that the person employed in disguising the stolen goods must have been a Papist; for he has omitted all mention of Giant fers martyrdom by being hanged, Pope, and "Fidelius," Faithful, sufdrawn, and quartered. many editions the "Pilgrim's ProNo one can tell through how book in the English language, with gress" has passed: probably no other and, some would add, the Works of the exception of the Holy Bible,William Shakespere, has obtained 80 The illustrations which have been constant and so wide a sale. collection as curious, if not as exdevised and engraved would form a tensive, as that which Mr. Duppa inspected at Vallumbrosa, where a eight thousand different engravings Monk had heaped together about specimens would be the most curiof the Virgin Mary. The worst ous; and Southey says, "When the reader has seen Giant Slaygood with Mr. Feeblemind in his hand, he will, nation of Anakim existed at this I think, agree with me, that if a day, the artist by whom that print deserve to be appointed historical was designed and executed would painter to His Highness the Prince of the Giants!" JOHN S. STAMP. SELECT LIST OF BOOKS RECENTLY PUBLISHED, With Characteristic Notices. [The insertion of any article in this List is not to be considered as pledging us to the approbation of its contents, unless it be accompanied by some express notice of our favourable opinion. Nor is the omission of any such notice to be regarded as indicating a contrary opinion; as our limits, and other reasons, impose on us the necessity of selection and brevity.] Delineation of Roman Catholicism, drawn from the authentic and acknowledged Standards of the Rome; namely, her Creeds, Catechisms, Church of Decisions of Councils, Papal Bulls, Roman Catholic Writers, the Records of History, &c. in which the peculiar Doctrines, Morals, Government, and Usages of the Church of Rome are : stated, treated at large, and confuted. |