and known and made them captains.'--_Moses_.

John Bunyan never lost his early love for a soldier's life any more than
he ever forgot the rare delights of his bell-ringing days. John Bunyan,
all his days, never saw a bell-rope that his fingers did not tingle, and
he never saw a soldier in uniform without instinctively shouldering his
youthful musket. Bunyan was one of those rare men who are of imagination
all compact; and consequently it is that all his books are full of the
scenes, the occupations, and the experiences of his early days. Not that
he says very much, in as many words, about what happened to him in the
days when he was a soldier; it is only once in all his many books that he
says that when he was a soldier such and such a thing happened to him. At
the same time, all his books bear the impress of his early days upon
them; and as for this special book of Bunyan's now open before us, it is
full from board to board of the strife and the din of his early battles.
The _Holy War_ is just John Bunyan's soldierly life
spiritualised--spiritualised and so worked up into this fine English
Classic.

Well, then, after Mansoul was taken and reduced, the victorious Prince
determined so to occupy the town with His soldiers that it should never
again either be taken by force from without, or ever again revolt by
weakness or by fear from within. And with this view He chose out five of
His best captains--My five pickt men, He always called them--and placed
those five captains and their thousands under them in the strongholds of
the town. On the margin of this page our versatile author speaks of that
step of Emmanuel's in the language of a philosopher, a moralist, and a
divine. 'Five graces,' he says, 'pickt out of an abundance of common
virtues.' This summing-up sentence stands on his stiff and dry margin.
But in the rich and living flow of the text itself our author goes on
writing like the man of genius he is. With all the warmth and colour and
dramatic movement of which this whole book is full, this great writer
goes on to set those five choice captains of our salvation before us in a
way that we shall never forget.

1. 'The first was that famous captain, the noble Captain Credence. His
were the red colours, and Mr. Promise bare them. And for a scutcheon he
had the Holy Lamb and the golden shield; and he had ten thousand men at
his feet.' Now, this same Captain Credence from first to last of the war
always