The difference between Bunyan and his predecessors is one more than anything of whole-heartedness and if there is only one work of fiction--for one can hardly call the Bible a work of fiction--if there is one work of prose fiction in England that, written before the birth of Bunyan, has survived to our time it is Malory’s _Morte d’Arthur_ and that survives because Malory whole-heartedly and unassumingly collected such legends of the Arthurian cycle as he liked and wrote them down simply and without flourishes. Otherwise, none of the pre-Elizabethan prose romances could to-day be read with any other than archæological pleasure, nor could any of the prose fiction which began to be mildly abundant in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean days. I suppose you might read Deloney’s _Jack of Newbury_ with some pleasure if you were interested in Elizabethan guild or household mysteries. But I cannot imagine anyone reading for pleasure either _Euphues_ or Greene’s _Menaphon_, either Lodge’s _Rosalynde_ or even Sidney’s _Arcadia_. One may glance at them from time to time, more or less in order to keep one’s end up against the literary archæologist, but they would all, including _Amadis de Gaul_, prove intolerable as books for “reading in”--to use an old phrase which meant a long, long, engrossed perusal. Nash’s _Jack of Wilton_ has been compared to _Don Quixote_, but there is no sense in reading the Englishman’s satire of forgotten manners when one can re-read Cervantes’ satire on things that are at the root of the human heart. The difference between Malory and the earlier romances or _Euphues_ or _Menaphon_ is simply the difference in the relative sincerities of their authors. Malory records what a simple mediaeval knight liked and to some extent how he looked at the world: it is modest and, its author being wrapped up in his subject, the work has no eye to the modes of the time--or to displaying the cleverness of the writer. You can engross yourself in the _Morte d’Arthur_ if your tastes lie in the least in Malory’s direction and, except that finally you may arrive at the conclusion that he was a modest and pleasant gentleman, you need never give the author a thought. With _Amadis de Gaul_ or _Euphues_, on the other hand, you are for ever thinking of the cleverness of the author. And you are meant to think of the cleverness of the author, and so you are in the case of _Rosalynde_ and an enormous proportion of the Elizabethan drama. The prose and even the blank verse of that age sparkled with trope, metaphor, image, simile, plays upon words, conceits and every type of verbal felicity, so that the last thing that comes to the mind in the case of almost any work of that age is the subject treated of.