the ideal of humanity, because it is founded on the belief that that ideal is the very image of God, is neither "low, abject, nor servile," but altogether chivalrous and heroic; and lastly, how, in his eyes, the humblest resignation and the loftiest aspiration are so far from being contradictory virtues, that it is only (so he holds) by rising to the "conception of the Supreme goodness" that man can attain “submission to the Supreme will." And when the reader has considered this, and more which he may find in this book, he will irritate himself no more about defects of outward method, but will be content to let the author teach his own lesson in his own way, trusting (and he will not trust in vain) that each seeming interruption is but a step forward in the moral process at which the author aims; and that there is full and conscious consistency in Mr. Brooke's method, whether or not there be dramatic unity in his plot. By that time, also, one may hope the earnest reader will have begun to guess at the causes which have made this book forgotten for a while; and perhaps to find them not in its defects, but in its excellencies; in its deep and grand ethics, in its broad and genial humanity, in the divine value which it attaches to the relations of husband and wife, father and child; and to the utter absence both of that sentimentalism and that superstition which have been alternately debauching, of late years, the minds of the young. And if he shall have arrived at this discovery, he will be able possibly to regard, at least with patience, those who are rash enough to affirm that they have learnt from this book more which is pure, sacred, and eternal, than from any which has been published since Spenser's "Faery Queen."

So go forth, once more, brave book, as God shall speed thee; and wherever thou meetest, whether in

peasant or in peer, with a royal heart, tender and true, magnanimous and chivalrous, enter in and dwell there; and help its owner to become (as thou canst help him) a man, a Christian, and a gentleman, as Henry Brooke was before him.

PILGRIM'S PROGRESS ILLUSTRATED.*

A SERIES of illustrations worthy of the great Puritan mystery has been as yet a desideratum. The eighteenth century could not be expected to produce one. The nineteenth has not produced one as yet, in spite of the great advance in the art of rendering thought into form, which is due to the influence of German designers. The reasons of this want_are simple enough. The Puritan bodies, to whom John Bunyan belongs, have not sufficiently lost their dislike of the fine arts, to produce from their own ranks artists capable of so great a work. The religious artists of the Church of England have employed their pencils rather on Scriptural and Medieval subjects. Whether the author of these designs, by trying to imagine for himself Bunyan's thoughts, rather from a simply human, than from a sectarian point of view, has done aught to supply the want, the Public must judge. If he has in some things failed, sensible persons at least will find excuses for him in the great difficulty of the undertaking.

To be a faithful illustrator of any book is no light task. For no illustration can be considered true, which does not project on the paper the very image which was projected upon the author's brain. Every poet (and Bunyan was a poet) thinks in pictures; to guess what each picture was, and set it down, is the whole of the illustrator's duty. But this requires a

"Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress," with Illustrations by CHARLES H. BENNETT.

dramatic faculty, a power of standing in another man's place, and seeing with his eyes, which falls to the lot of few; and which in the case of Bunyan, whose strength lies in his knowledge of human character, to the lot of very few indeed. His men and

women are living persons, no two of them alike; not mere abstractions of a vice or a virtue, but English men and women of his own time, whose natural peculiarities of countenance, language, gesture, have been moulded in the course of years, by obedience to some overruling defect or virtue. I say of one; for of those complexities and contradictions of the human heart, which we are now so fond of trying to unravel, Bunyan takes little note. The distinction between children of light and those of darkness was too strongly marked, both in his religious system, and (as he believed) in the two English parties of the day, for him to conceive those double characters which Shakspeare, from a wider and clearer point of view, saw round him, and drew so well. Was the man regenerate or unregenerate? a child of God or of the Devil? a good man and true, or a bad man and false? is his only criterion. In his regenerate characters, indeed, such as Christian and Hopeful, he introduces this self-contradiction, the image of that inward conflict between "the spirit and the flesh," which he had felt in himself; but in the unregenerate ones he allows of no such conflict. They are selfcontentedly"dead in trespasses and sins," the slaves of some one bad habit, which has moulded gradually their whole personality. In this conception, narrow as it seems at first sight, he is not altogether wrong. It is a patent fact, that in proportion as any man is shut up in self, and insensible of the higher aims of life, his character narrows to one overruling idea, and becomes absorbed by one overruling passion, till, like the madman, he becomes unconscious of the whole universe, save at the one fixed point

at which it seems to touch his own selfish nature. Shakspeare, when he draws (as he very seldom does) thoroughly bad men, finds it necessary to narrow their sphere of thought and feeling, till they would become (under less skilful hands than his) mere impersonations of special vice. Edmund, Shylock, and Iago have that horrible consistency of aim, that concentration of mind and heart upon one paltry purpose, which Bunyan has extended to the whole "unregenerate" world. The vast middle mass (as yet unclassified in any system) which lies between "saints" and "sinners," and in which our modern poet, dramatist, novelist, work as their proper sphere of subject-matter, he simply could not see. That there were even among saints self-contradictory characters in plenty, like By-ends and Demas, his knowledge of fact taught him; but his system commanded him to pronounce them, too, "unregenerate" and "false brethren," not to be numbered among the elect.

Fettered by so narrow and partial a conception of humanity, Bunyan's genius must indeed have been great to enable him to represent each personage in his book as a separate individual, differing, even in the minutiæ of manner and language, each from the other; and yet having those very minutiæ tinged by the ruling passion; and all the more difficult must be the task of the illustrator, who undertakes to reproduce the very human faces which Bunyan saw in his vision, which he had seen, perhaps, in the church and in the market-place, and studied by such instincts or rules of physiognomy as he had, before he transferred them to his story.

For that Bunyan drew mostly from life there can be little doubt. He may have been now and then, like all true poets, an idealizer, out of several personages compounding one. But the very narrowness of his characters, when considered together with