The story is dotted with these lifelike incidents, and the consistency is rather in the basis of the allegory than in the allegory itself. In truth, we get in the Pilgrim’s Progress an inimitable picture of social life in the lower middle class of England, and in this second part a very vivid glimpse of a Puritan household. The glimpse is corrective of a too stern and formal apprehension of social Puritanism, and in the story are exhibited the natural charms and graces which not only could not be expelled by a stern creed, but were essentially connected with the lofty ideals which made Puritanism a mighty force in history. Bunyan had a genius for story-telling, and his allegory is very frank; but what he showed as well as what he did not show in his picture of Christiana and the children indicates the constraint which rested upon the whole Puritan conception of childhood. It is seen at its best in Bunyan, and this great Puritan poet of common life found a place for it in his survey of man’s estate; nature asserted itself in spite of and through Puritanism. * * * * * Milton’s Christmas Hymn has the organ roll of a mind moving among high themes, and making the earth one of the golden spheres. Pope’s sacred eclogue of the Messiah is perhaps the completest expression of the religious sentiment of an age which was consciously bounded by space and time. In Pope’s day, the world was scarcely a part of a greater universe; eternity was only a prolongation of time, and the sense of beauty, acute as it was, was always sharply defined. Pope’s rhymed couplets, with their absolute finality, their clean conclusion, their epigrammatic snap, are the most perfect symbols of the English mind of that period. When in the Messiah we read,— “Rapt into future times the bard begun, A Virgin shall conceive, a Virgin bear a son! ... Swift fly the years and rise the expected morn! O spring to light, auspicious babe, be born!” we remember Milton’s Infant God. The two poets touch, with a like faintness, the childhood of Jesus, but the one through awe and grandeur of contemplation, the other through the polite indifference of a man of the world. Or take Pope’s mundane philosophy, as exhibited most elaborately in his Essay on Man, and set it beside Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man:— “Behold the child, by Nature’s kindly law Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw: Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight, A little louder, but as empty quite: Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage, And beads and prayer-books are the toys of age: Pleased with this bauble still, as that before; Till tired he sleeps and life’s poor play is o’er.”