sh prose that simplicity, directness, and
colloquial air which marks it off from the more artificial diction of
Milton, Taylor and Browne.

A few books whose shaping influences lay in the past belong by their
date to this period. John Bunyan, a poor tinker, whose reading was
almost wholly in the Bible and Fox's _Book of Martyrs_, imprisoned for
twelve years in Bedford jail for preaching at conventicles, wrote and,
in 1678, published his _Pilgrim's Progress_, the greatest of religious
allegories. Bunyan's spiritual experiences were so real to him that they
took visible concrete shape in his imagination as men, women, cities,
landscapes. It is the simplest, the most transparent of allegories.
Unlike the _Faerie Queene_, the story of _Pilgrim's Progress_ has no
reason for existing apart from its inner meaning, and yet its reality is
so vivid that children read of Vanity Fair and the Slough of Despond and
Doubting Castle and the Valley of the Shadow of Death with the same
belief with which they read of Crusoe's cave or Aladdin's palace.

It is a long step from the Bedford tinker to the cultivated poet of
_Paradise Lost_. They represent the poles of the Puritan party. Yet it
may admit of a doubt whether the Puritan epic is, in essentials, as
vital and original a work as the Puritan allegory. They both came out
quietly and made little noise at first. But the _Pilgrim's Progress_ got
at once into circulation, and hardly a single copy of the first edition
remains. Milton, too--who received ten pounds for the copyright of
_Paradise Lost_--seemingly found that "fit audience though few" for
which he prayed, as his poem reached its second impression in five years
(1672). Dryden visited him in his retirement and asked leave to turn it
into rime and put it on the stage as an opera. "Ay," said Milton, good
humoredly, "you may tag my verses." And accordingly they appeared, duly
tagged, in Dryden's operatic masque, the _State of Innocence_. In this
startling conjunction we have the two ages in a nutshell: the
Commonwealth was an epic, the Restoration an opera.

The literary period covered by the life of Pope, 1688-1744, is marked
off by no distinct line from the generation before it. Taste continued
to be governed by the precepts of Boileau and the French classical
school. Poetry remained chiefly didactic and satirical, and satire in
Pope's hands was more personal even than in Dryden's, and addressed
itself less to public issues. The