One's fancy chuckle while his heart doth ake.
When Jacob saw his Rachel with the sheep,
At the same time he did both laugh and weep."

And even Dr. Cheever, in his excellent lectures on the _Pilgrim's
Progress_, confesses that though the Second Part never ceases for a
moment to tell the serious story of the Pilgrimage, at the same time, it
sometimes becomes so merry as almost to pass over into absolute comedy.
"There is one passage," says Cheever, "which for exquisite humour, quiet
satire, and naturalness in the development of character is scarcely
surpassed in the language. It is the account of the courtship between
Mr. Brisk and Mercy which took place at the House Beautiful."

Now, the insertion of such an episode as that of Mr. Brisk into such a
book as the _Pilgrim's Progress_ is only yet another proof of the health,
the strength, and the truth to nature of John Bunyan's mind. His was
eminently an honest, straightforward, manly, English understanding. A
smaller man would not have ventured on Mr. Brisk in such a book as the
_Pilgrim's Progress_. But there is no affectation, there is no prudery,
there is no superiority to nature in John Bunyan. He knew quite well
that of the thousands of men and women who were reading his _Pilgrim_
there was no subject, not even religion itself, that was taking up half
so much of their thoughts as just love-making and marriage. And, like
the wise man and the true teacher he was, he here points out to all his
readers how well true religion and the fullest satisfaction of the
warmest and the most universal of human affections can be both harmonised
and made mutually helpful. In Bunyan's day love was too much left to the
playwrights, just as in our day it is too much left to the poets and the
novelists. And thus it is that in too many instances affection and
passion have taken full possession of the hearts and the lives of our
young people before any moral or religious lesson on these all-important
subjects has been given to them: any lesson such as John Bunyan so
winningly and so beautifully gives here. "This incident," says Thomas
Scott, "is very properly introduced, and it is replete with instruction."

Now, Mr. Brisk, to begin with, was, so we are told, a young man of some
breeding,--that is to say, he was a young man of some social position,
some education, and of a certain good manner, at least on the surface. In
David Scott's Illustrations Mr. Brisk stands before