e of the
river by Christian and Hopeful blinds us to what may be almost termed the
impossibility of two persons passing through the final struggle together,
and dying at the same moment, but this charm is wanting in the prosaic
picture of the company of fellow-travellers coming down to the water's
edge, and waiting till the postman blows his horn and bids them cross.
Much as the Second Part contains of what is admirable, and what no one
but Bunyan could have written, we feel after reading it that, in Mr.
Froude's words, the rough simplicity is gone, and has been replaced by a
tone of sentiment which is almost mawkish. "Giants, dragons, and angelic
champions carry us into a spurious fairyland where the knight-errant is a
preacher in disguise. Fair ladies and love-matches, however decorously
chastened, suit ill with the sternness of the mortal conflict between the
soul and sin." With the acknowledged shortcomings of the Second Part of
"The Pilgrim's Progress," we may be well content that Bunyan never
carried out the idea hinted at in the closing words of his allegory:
"Shall it be my lot to go that way again, I may give those that desire it
an account of what I am here silent about; in the meantime I bid my
reader--Adieu."

Bunyan's second great allegorical work, "The Holy War," need not detain
us long. Being an attempt, and in the nature of things an unsuccessful
attempt, to clothe what writers on divinity call "the plan of salvation"
in a figurative dress, the narrative, with all its vividness of
description in parts, its clearly drawn characters with their picturesque
nomenclature, and the stirring vicissitudes of the drama, is necessarily
wanting in the personal interest which attaches to an individual man,
like Christian, and those who are linked with or follow his career. In
fact, the tremendous realities of the spiritual history of the human race
are entirely unfit for allegorical treatment as a whole. Sin, its
origin, its consequences, its remedy, and the apparent failure of that
remedy though administered by Almighty hands, must remain a mystery for
all time. The attempts made by Bunyan, and by one of much higher
intellectual power and greater poetic gifts than Bunyan--John Milton--to
bring that mystery within the grasp of the finite intellect, only render
it more perplexing. The proverbial line tells us that--

"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."

Bunyan and Milton were as far as possible fr