House Beautiful and not making the acquaintance of Discretion and
Prudence and Charity may have had something to do with the fact that one
named Wanton had like to have done him such a mischief. His remarkable
experiences, however, with Adam the First, with Moses, and then with the
Man with holes in His hands, all that makes up a page in Faithful's
autobiography we could ill have spared. His encounter with Shame also,
and soon afterwards with Talkative, are classical passages in his so
individual history. Altogether, it would be almost impossible for us to
imagine two pilgrims talking so heartily together, and yet so completely
unlike one another. A very important lesson surely as to how we should
abstain from measuring other men by ourselves, as well as ourselves by
other men; an excellent lesson also as to how we should learn to allow
for all possible varieties among good men, both in their opinions, their
experiences, and their attainments. True Puritan as the author of _The
Pilgrim's Progress_ is, he is no Procrustes. He does not cut down all
his pilgrims to one size, nor does he clip them all into one pattern.
They are all thinking men, but they are not all men of one way of
thinking. John Bunyan is as fresh as Nature herself, and as free and
full as Holy Scripture herself in the variety, in the individuality, and
even in the idiosyncrasy of his spiritual portrait gallery.
Vanity Fair is one of John Bunyan's universally-admitted masterpieces.
The very name of the fair is one of his happiest strokes. Thackeray's
famous book owes half its popularity to the happy name he borrowed from
John Bunyan. Thackeray's author's heart must have leaped in his bosom
when Vanity Fair struck him as a title for his great satire. 'Then I saw
in my dream that when they were got out of the wilderness they presently
saw a town before them, and the name of that town is Vanity, and at that
town there is a fair kept called Vanity Fair. The fair is kept all the
year long, and it beareth the name of Vanity Fair, because the town where
it is kept is lighter than Vanity. And, also, because all that is sold
there is vanity. As is the saying of the wise, All that cometh is
vanity. The fair is no new erected business, but a thing of ancient
standing: I will show you the original of it. About five thousand years
ago there were pilgrims walking to the Celestial City, as these two
honest persons now are, and Beelzebub, Apollyon, and Legion, with their
companions, perceiving that by the path that the pilgrims made, that
their way to the city lay through this town of Vanity, they contrived
there to set up a fair: a fair wherein should be sold all sorts of
vanity, and that it should last all the year long. Therefore at this
fair are all such merchandise sold as houses, lands, trades, places,
honours, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, pleasures, and
delights of all sorts, as wives, husbands, children, masters, servants,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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