ood upon a mighty hill; but the Pilgrims
went up that hill with ease, because they had these two men to lead
them up by the arms; they had likewise left their mortal garments
behind them in the river; for though they went in with them, they
came out without them."

[Illustration:

Let Badman's broken leg put check
To Badman's course of evil,
Lest, next time, Badman breaks his neck,
And so goes to the devil.

WOODCUT FROM THE FIRST EDITION OF MR. BADMAN]

Of all the words in the above selection, eighty per cent are
monosyllables. Few authors could have resisted the tendency to try to
be impressive at such a climax. One has more respect for this world,
on learning that it has set the seal of its approval on such earnest
simplicity and has neglected works that strive with every art to
attract attention.

Bunyan furthermore has a rare combination of imagination and dramatic
power. His abstractions became living persons. They have warmer blood
coursing in their veins than many of the men and women in modern
fiction. Giant Despair is a living giant. We can hear the clanking of
the chains and the groans of the captives in his dungeon. We are not
surprised to learn that Bunyan imagined that he saw and conversed with
these characters. The _Pilgrim's Progress_ is a prose drama. Note the
vivid dramatic presentation of the tendency to evil, which we all have
at some time felt threatening to wreck our nobler selves:--

"Then Apollyon straddled quite over the whole breadth of the way,
and said, 'I am void of fear in this matter; prepare thyself to die;
for I swear by my infernal den that thou shall go no further; here
will I spill thy soul.'"

It would be difficult to find English prose more simple, earnest,
strong, imaginative, and dramatic than this. Bunyan's style felt the
shaping influence of the _Bible_ more than of all other works
combined. He knew the _Scriptures_ almost by heart.

THE POETRY OF THE PURITAN AGE

Lyrical Verse.--The second quarter of the seventeenth century
witnessed an outburst of song that owed its inspiration to Elizabethan
lyrical verse.

Soon after 1600 a change in lyric poetry is noticeable. The sonnet
fell into disfavor with the majority of lyrists. The two poets of
greatest influence over this period, Ben Jonson and John Donne,
opposed the sonnet. Ben Jonson complained that it compels all ideas,
irrespective of their worth, to fill a space of exactly fourteen
line