exact order and in the full power in which they are told of Christian in
Bunyan's book, they begin to have doubts about themselves as to whether
they are true pilgrims at all. But here is Faithful, with whom Christian
held such sweet and confidential discourse, and yet he had come through
not a single one of all these things. The two pilgrims had come from the
same City of Destruction indeed, and they had met at the gate of Vanity
and passed through Vanity Fair together, but, till they embraced one
another again in the Celestial City, that was absolutely all the
experience they had in common. Faithful had never had any such burden on
his back as that was which had for so long crushed Christian to the
earth. And the all but complete absence of such a burden may have helped
to let Faithful get over the Slough of Despond dry shod. He had the good
lot to escape Sinai also and the Hill Difficulty, and his passing by the
House Beautiful and not making the acquaintance of Discretion and
Prudence and Charity may have had something to do with the fact that one
named Wanton had like to have done him such a mischief. His remarkable
experiences, however, with Adam the First, with Moses, and then with the
Man with holes in His hands, all that makes up a page in Faithful's
autobiography we could ill have spared. His encounter with Shame also,
and soon afterwards with Talkative, are classical passages in his so
individual history. Altogether, it would be almost impossible for us to
imagine two pilgrims talking so heartily together, and yet so completely
unlike one another. A very important lesson surely as to how we should
abstain from measuring other men by ourselves, as well as ourselves by
other men; an excellent lesson also as to how we should learn to allow
for all possible varieties among good men, both in their opinions, their
experiences, and their attainments. True Puritan as the author of _The
Pilgrim's Progress_ is, he is no Procrustes. He does not cut down all
his pilgrims to one size, nor does he clip them all into one pattern.
They are all thinking men, but they are not all men of one way of
thinking. John Bunyan is as fresh as Nature herself, and as free and
full as Holy Scripture herself in the variety, in the individuality, and
even in the idiosyncrasy of his spiritual portrait gallery.

Vanity Fair is one of John Bunyan's universally-admitted masterpieces.
The very name of the fair is one of his happiest