does not project on paper the very image which was projected upon the author's brain. Every poet (and Bunyan was a poet) thinks in pictures: to guess what each picture was, and set it down, is the whole of the illustrator's duty. But this requires a dramatic faculty, a power of standing in another man's place, and seeing with his eyes, which falls to the lot of few; and which in the case of Bunyan, whose strength lies in his knowledge of human character, falls to the lot of very few indeed. His men and women are living persons, no two of them alike; not mere abstractions of a vice or a virtue, but English men and women of his own time, whose natural peculiarities of countenance, language, gesture, have been moulded in the course of years, by obedience to some one overruling defect or virtue. I say of one; for of those complexities and contradictions of the human heart, which we are now so fond of trying to unravel, Bunyan takes little note. The distinction between the children of light and those of darkness was too strongly marked, both in his religious system, and (as he believed) in the two English parties of the day, for him to conceive those double characters which Shakespeare, from a wider and clearer point of view, saw round him, and drew so well. Was the man regenerate or unregenerate? A child of God or of the Devil? A good man and true, or a bad man and false? is his only criterion. In his regenerate characters, indeed, such as Christian and Hopeful, he introduces this self-contradiction, the image of that inward conflict between the spirit and the flesh,' which he had

felt in himself: but in the unregenerate ones he allows of no such conflict. They are self-contentedly 'dead in trespasses and sins,' the slaves of some one bad habit, which has moulded gradually their whole personality. In this conception, narrow as it seems at first sight, he is not altogether wrong. It is a patent fact, that in proportion as any man is shut up in self, and insensible of the higher aims of life, his character narrows to one overruling idea, and becomes absorbed by one overruling passion, till, like the madman, he becomes unconscious of the whole universe, save at the one fixed point at which it seems to touch his own selfish nature. Shakespeare, when he draws (as he very seldom does) thoroughly bad men, finds it necessary to narrow their sphere of thought and feeling, till they would become (under less skilful hands than his) mere impersonations of some special vice. Edmund, Shylock, and Iago have that horrible consistency of aim, that concentration of mind and heart upon one paltry purpose, which Bunyan has extended to the whole 'unregenerate' world. The vast middle mass (as yet unclassified in any system) which lies between 'saints' and 'sinners,' and in which our modern poet, dramatist, novelist, work as their proper sphere of subject matter, he simply could not see. That there were even among saints self-contradictory characters in plenty, like By-ends and Demas, his knowledge of fact taught him; but his system commanded him to pronounce them, too, unregenerate' and 'false brethren,' not to be numbered among the elect.

Fettered by so narrow and partial a conception of humanity, Bunyan's genius must indeed have been great to enable him to represent each personage in his book as a separate individual, differing, even in the minutiæ of manner and language, each from the other; and yet having those very minutiæ tinged by the ruling passion : and all the more difficult must be the task of the illustrator, who undertakes to reproduce the very human faces which Bunyan saw in his vision-which he had seen, perhaps, in the church and in the market-place, and studied by such instincts or rules of physiognomy as he had, before he transferred them to his story.

For that Bunyan drew mostly from life there can be little doubt. He may have been now and then, like all true poets, an idealiser, out of several personages compounding one. But the very narrowness of his characters, when considered together with their strong individuality, makes it more probable that he accepted certain persons whom he actually knew in life, as fair types of the fault which he was exposing.

On this method, therefore, Mr. Bennett has constructed the great majority of his ideal portraits. Believing that the ideal is best seen in the actual, the universal in the particular, he has boldly drawn, as far as he could, from life. I say boldly; for to do this is to do no less than to run his knowledge of human nature against Bunyan's. But by no other method, surely, was success attainable; and if he has fallen short, he has fallen short on the right road. For Bunyan's men are not merely life

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portraits, but English Portraits; men of the solid, practical, unimpassioned midland race. In no other country in Europe did Puritanism develop itself in a form of which The Pilgrim's Progress would have been the true exponent. The mystic element, always so strong in Germany, is altogether wanting; and the calmness of its tone, conceived as it was amid war and persecution, contrasts and most favourably -with the virulence and ferocity which stained both Scotch and French Puritanism. Midland English John Bunyan is wholly; and seeing that the character of midland men seems to have changed, since his time, as little as their surnames, the truest types of his creations are still to be looked for in the country where he wrote.

All attempt to ennoble the subject by introducing a Classic or Scriptural type of feature and figure, as some have done, is absurd. The book represents the lifethoughts not of Greeks, nor of Jews, but of English yeomen and tradesmen; and as such should its personages be drawn. Half-naked figures in violent postures were not in John Bunyan's brain as he wrote; but quiet folk going about Bedford town in slop-breeches, bands, and steeple hats; and even the 'three shining ones' who met Christian at the foot of the cross, are, perhaps, none other than the three poor women who sat at a door in the sun in Bedford town, and talked with him of heavenly things, ere he had yet learnt the way to heaven.' To him it would have been blasphemy to suppose that even old Jews were nearer the spiritual world than Bedford

tradesmen; or that the sacredness of his figures could be increased by putting them into the flowing garments of another country and age. To him, as to all true Puritans, God was here, living, working, present, even more mightily (unless 'Gospel privileges' were below those of the Law') than in the days of patriarchs and prophets; and the same intense sense of the divine presence which made, in his eyes, all forms and ceremonies, all beauty of art and poetry, as worthless as the picture is beside the living reality, would have made him content to clothe his figures as he saw folks clothed around him; even (could he have sympathised with Catholics) to understand why the old painters represented Bible personages in the dress of medieval Italy, and introduced portraits of men still living into pictures of Bible stories. Heaven and hell had again drawn near to earth, and mingled themselves with the common works and ways of men, even as in the time of Luther or of Dante. And in their light, celestial-infernal, the modern and the commonplace became awful and sacred. While all souls were naked before the judgment-seat of God, what matter for the clothes their bodies wore ?

It is thus that in every age, intense and true faith expresses itselt in the most everyday and the most modern forms; while in ages of half belief and of dying creeds, the artist and the public alike try to keep up in their own minds the tradition of a sacredness which they feel is vanishing away, by thrusting their conceptions back into the grand mist of past ages, and dressing up the