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These stanzas afford an excellent illustration to the meaning of Bunyan in his Pilgrim's Progress, where Christian, before the cross, receives the roll or certificate loses it for a season in the arbour on the hill Difficulty, when loitering and sleeping on his way to the Interpreter's house, but regains it by repentance and prayers, and eventually, having crossed the river, gives it in at the gate of the Celestial City, and is admitted.
Yet the novel proper lingered: and, except in the single and eccentric masterpiece of Bunyan, the seventeenth century ended without having seen one real specimen of prose fiction that was thoroughly satisfactory.
John Bunyan doubtless owed to John Gifford the peculiar type of his Christianity, its comprehensiveness, and its sect- forgetting zeal for the things of Jesus Christ. He had not long been a member of the church when he was called to exercise its actual ministry.
Walton and Bunyan were men who should have known each other. It is a pleasant fancy, to me, that they may have met on the banks of Ouse, while John was meditating a sermon, and Izaak was "attentive of his trembling quill."
The other editions are more reputable, but very incorrect. One of them bears the imprint of 'London, for James Bunyan, 1760. Another has 'London, sold by Baxter, Doolittle, & Burkit, evidently fictitious names, adopted from those three great authors.
You will receive letters and messages some day and the style of our friends is apt to be reminiscent of John Bunyan ... The car will be at the door tomorrow to catch the ten-thirty, and I will give you the address of the rooms that have been taken for you ... Beyond that I have nothing to say, except to beg you to play the part well and keep your temper. You behaved very nicely at dinner.
Its special note is a deliverance from self with a joy in abandonment to some thing other than self, like that which has been often recorded as an experience in religious conversion; when Bunyan, for example, ceased from the efforts to establish his own righteousness and saw that righteousness above him in the eternal heavens, he walked as a man suddenly illuminated, and could hardly forbear telling his joy to the crows upon the plough-land; and so, in its degree, with the spiritual exaltation produced by the love of man and woman when it touches a certain rare but real altitude.
'To all people to whom this present writing shall com, J. Bunyan of the parish of St. Cuthbirt's, in the towne of Bedford, in the county of Bedford, Brazier send greeting.
These are they who would make our proper subject begin with Marivaux and Richardson, or at earliest with Madame de La Fayette, who exclude Bunyan altogether, and sometimes go so far as to question the right of entry to Defoe. But the counter-arguments are numerous: and any one of them would almost suffice by itself.
This paper cannot now be discovered; but the story is so perfectly ridiculous as to render it quite improbable that Bunyan had any knowledge of it. The account is contained in a rare pamphlet of four leaves, preserved in the very curious library of the Society of Friends at Devonshire House, Bishopsgate.
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