Never was such an infamous gang impanelled. Rancour and rage and vindictiveness, and every passion awakened in the breasts of the strong by local insolence and legal injustice, is supplied by Bunyan with epithets of immense retaliative force. He is the greatest name-maker among authors. He was a spiritual Comanche. He prayed like a savage. He said himself, when describing the art of the religious rhetorician--an art of which he was the greatest master of his time:-- You see the ways the fisherman doth take To catch the fish; what engines doth he make! Behold! how he engageth all his wits, Also his snares, lines, angles, hooks, and nets; Yet fish there be that neither hook nor line, Nor snare, nor net, nor engine can make thine; They must be grop'd for, and be tickled too, Or they will not be catch'd, whate'er you do. Bunyan never tickled the sinner. It was not his way. He carried a prong. He pricked the erring. He published a pamphlet to suggest what ought to be done to holy pedestrians, whose difficulties lay rearward. He put detonating balls under their feet which exploded as they stepped and alarmed them along. He lined the celestial road with horrors. If they turned their heads they saw a fiend worse than Lot's wife who was merely changed into a pillar of sweet all-preserving salt. Bunyan's unfortunate converts who looked back fell into a pit filled with fire, where they howled and burnt for evermore. Ah! with what pleasure must the great Bedfordshire artist have contemplated his masterly pages as day by day he added to them the portrait of some new scoundrel, or painted with dexterous and loving hand the wholesome outlines of some honest man, or devised some new phrase which like a new note or new colour would delight singer or painter for generations yet to come. He must have strode proudly along his cell as he put his praise and his scorn into imperishable similes.