ut preserves his
reputation intact and does not even experience any deathbed
repentance--is rather an unconscious study for a character in a novel--a
sketch of a _bourgeois_ Barnes Newcome--than anything more. It has the
old drawback of being narrated, not acted or spoken at first hand: and
so, though it is in a sense Fielding at nearly his best, more than half
a century before Fielding attempted _Joseph Andrews_, no more need be
said of it. So, too, the religious element and the allegory _are_ too
prominent in _The Holy War_--the novelist's desk is made too much of a
pulpit in large parts of it. Other parts, concerning the inhabitants of
Mansoul and their private affairs, are domestic novel-writing of nearly
the pure kind: and if _The Pilgrim's Progress_ did not exist, it would
be worth while to pick them out and discuss them. But, as it most
fortunately does exist, this is not needful.

[5] The heroic kind had lent itself very easily and obviously to
allegory. Not very long before Bunyan English literature had
been enriched with a specimen of this double variety which for
Sir W. Raleigh "marks the lowest depth to which English romance
writing sank." I do not know that I could go quite so far as
this in regard to the book--_Bentivolio and Urania_ by Nathaniel
Ingelo. The first edition of this appeared in 1660: the second
(there seem to have been at least four) lies before me at this
moment dated 1669, or nine years before the _Progress_ itself.
You require a deep-sea-lead of uncommonly cunning construction
to sound, register, and compare the profundities of the bathos
in novels. The book has about 400 folio pages very closely
packed with type, besides an alphabetical index full of Hebrew
and Greek derivations of its names--"Gnothisauton," "Achamoth,"
"Ametameletus," "Dogmapernes," and so forth. Its principles are
inexorably virtuous; there is occasional action interspersed
among its innumerable discourses, and I think it not improbable
that if it were only possible to read it, it might do one some
good. But it would not be the good of the novel.

The only fault with the novel-character of the greater book which might
possibly be found by a critic who did not let the allegory bite him, and
was not frightened by the religion, is that there is next to no love
element in it, though there are wedding bells. Mercy is indeed quite
nice enough for a