artificial and smart, or sensible and slow. He came with
poems of which the music seemed to gallop, like thundering hoofs and
ringing bridles of a rushing border troop. Here were goblin, ghost, and
fairy, fight and foray, fair ladies and true lovers, gallant knights and
hard blows, blazing beacons on every hill crest and on the bartisan of
every tower. Here was a world made alive again that had been dead for
three hundred years--a world of men and women.

They say that the archaeology is not good. Archaeology is a science; in
its application to poetry, Scott was its discoverer. Others can name the
plates of a coat of armour more learnedly than he, but he made men wear
them. They call his Gothic art false, his armour pasteboard; but he put
living men under his castled roofs, living men into his breastplates and
taslets. Science advances, old knowledge becomes ignorance; it is poetry
that does not die, and that will not die, while--

"The triple pride
Of Eildon looks over Strathclyde."

JOHN BUNYAN

Dr. Johnson once took Bishop Percy's little daughter on his knee, and
asked her what she thought of the "Pilgrim's Progress." The child
answered that she had not read it. "No?" replied the Doctor; "then I
would not give one farthing for you," and he set her down and took no
further notice of her.

This story, if true, proves that the Doctor was rather intolerant. We
must not excommunicate people because they have not our taste in books.
The majority of people do not care for books at all.

There is a descendant of John Bunyan's alive now, or there was lately,
who never read the "Pilgrim's Progress." Books are not in his line. Nay,
Bunyan himself, who wrote sixty works, was no great reader. An Oxford
scholar who visited him in his study found no books at all, except some
of Bunyan's own and Foxe's "Book of Martyrs."

Yet, little as the world in general cares for reading, it has read Bunyan
more than most. One hundred thousand copies of the "Pilgrim" are
believed to have been sold in his own day, and the story has been done
into the most savage languages, as well as into those of the civilised
world.

Dr. Johnson, who did not like Dissenters, praises the "invention,
imagination, and conduct of the story," and knew no other book he wished
longer except "Robinson Crusoe" and "Don Quixote." Well, Dr. Johnson
would not have given a farthing for _me_, as I am quite contented with
the present len