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"the lock went damnable hard." When Great-Heart is delighted with Mr.
Honest, he calls him "a cock of the right kind." The poem _On Christian
Behaviour_, which we have quoted, contains the lines--
"When all men's cards are fully played,
Whose will abide the light?"
These are quaint instances of the way in which even the questionable
parts of the unregenerate life of the dreamer came in the end to serve
the uses of his religion.
There are many gems in the Second Part of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ which
are full of mother-wit and sly fun. Mr. Honest confesses, "I came from
the town of Stupidity; it lieth about four degrees beyond the City of
Destruction." Then there is Mr. Fearing, that morbidly self-conscious
creature, who is so much at home in the Valley of Humiliation that he
kneels down and kisses the flowers in its grass. He is a man who can
never get rid of himself for a moment, and who bores all the company
with his illimitable and anxious introspection. Yet, in Vanity Fair,
when practical facts have to be faced instead of morbid fancies and
inflamed conscience, he is the most valiant of men, whom they can hardly
keep from getting himself killed, and for that matter all the rest of
them. Here, again, is an inimitable flash of insight, where Simple,
Sloth, and Presumption have prevailed with "one Short-Wind, one
Sleepy-Head, and with a young woman, her name was Dull, to turn out of
the way and become as they."
Every now and then these natural touches of portraiture rise to a true
sublimity, as all writing that is absolutely true to the facts of human
nature tends to do. Great-Heart says to Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, "Let me
see thy sword," and when he has taken it in his hand and looked at it
for awhile, he adds, "Ha! it is a right Jerusalem blade." That sword
lingers in Bunyan's imagination, for, at the close of Valiant's life,
part of his dying speech is this "My sword I give to him that shall
succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can
get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me that
I have fought His battles."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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