When we would try to estimate the processes by which the great allegory was built up, the first fact that strikes us is its extreme aloofness from current events which must have been very familiar to him. In others of his works he tells many stories of actual life, but these are of a private and more or less gossiping nature, many of them fantastic and grotesque, such as those appalling tales of swearers, drunkards, and other specially notorious sinners being snatched away by the devil--narratives which bear the marks of crude popular imagination in details like the actual smell of sulphur left behind. In the whole _Pilgrim's Progress_ there is no reference whatever to the Civil War, in which we know that Bunyan had fought, although there are certain parts of it which were probably suggested by events of that campaign. The allegory is equally silent concerning the Great Fire and the Great Plague of London, which were both fresh in the memory of every living man. The only phrase which might have been suggested by the Fire, is that in which the Pilgrim says, "I hear that our little city is to be destroyed by fire"--a phrase which obviously has much more direct connection with the destruction of Sodom than with that of London. The only suggestions of those disastrous latter years of the reign of Charles the Second, are some doubtful allusions to the rise and fall of persecution, few of which can be clearly identified with any particular events. There are several interesting indications that Bunyan made use of recent and contemporary secular literature. The demonology of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ is quite different from that of the _Holy War_. It used to be suggested that Bunyan had altered his views in consequence of the publication of Milton's _Paradise Regained_, which appeared in 1671. That was when it was generally supposed that he had written the _Pilgrim's Progress_ in his earlier imprisonment. If, as is now conceded, it was in the later imprisonment that he wrote the book, this theory loses much of its plausibility, for Milton published his _Paradise Regained_ before the first edition of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ was penned. It is, of course, always possible that between the _Pilgrim's Progress_ and the _Holy War_ Bunyan may have seen Milton's work, or may have been told about it, for he certainly changed his demonology and made it more like Milton's. Again, there are certain passages in Spenser's _Faerie Queene_ which bear so close a resemblance to Bunyan's description of the Celestial City, that it is difficult not to suppose that either directly or indirectly that poem had influenced Bunyan's creation; while in at least one of his songs he approaches so near both the language and the rhythm of a song of Shakespeare's as to make it very probable that he had heard it sung.[2]