and Hypocrisy. Like the Pilgrim, they are bound for Mount Zion;
but the wicket-gate was 'too far about,' and they had come by a short cut.
'They had custom for it a thousand years and more; and custom being of so
long standing would be admitted legal by any impartial judge.' Whether
right or wrong they insist that they are in the way, and no more is to be
said. But they are soon out of it again. The hill is the hill Difficulty,
and the road parts into three. Two go round the bottom, as modern engineers
would make them. The other rises straight over the top. Formalist and
Hypocrisy choose the easy ways, and are heard of no more. Pilgrim climbs
up, and after various accidents comes to the second resting-place, the
Palace Beautiful, built by the Lord of the Hill to entertain strangers in.
The recollections of Sir Bevis of Southampton furnished Bunyan with his
framework. Lions guard the court. Fair ladies entertain him as if he had
been a knight-errant in quest of the Holy Grail. The ladies, of course, are
all that they ought to be: the Christian graces--Discretion, Prudence,
Piety, and Charity. He tells them his history. They ask him if he has
brought none of his old belongings with him. He answers yes; but greatly
against his will: his inward and carnal cogitations, with which his
countrymen, as well as himself, were so much delighted. Only in golden
hours they seemed to leave him. Who cannot recognise the truth of this? Who
has not groaned over the follies and idiocies that cling to us like the
doggerel verses that hang about our memories? The room in which he sleeps
is called Peace. In the morning he is shown the curiosities, chiefly
Scripture relics, in the palace. He is taken to the roof, from which he
sees far off the outlines of the Delectable Mountains. Next, the ladies
carry him to the armoury, and equip him for the dangers which lie next
before him. He is to go down into the Valley of Humiliation, and pass
thence through the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

Bunyan here shows the finest insight. To some pilgrims the Valley of
Humiliation was the pleasantest part of the journey. Mr. Feeblemind,
in the second part of the story, was happier there than anywhere. But
Christian is Bunyan himself; and Bunyan had a stiff self-willed
nature, and had found his spirit the most stubborn part of him. Down
here he encounters Apollyon himself, 'straddling quite over the whole
breadth of the way'--a more effective devil than the Di