As to that I am no authority and the reader must settle for himself whether that hen or that egg came first--I mean whether the spirit of the English populace demanded first the English Prayer Book and the English Bible and demanded afterwards in due course the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ and _Robinson Crusoe_, or whether the English Bible so influenced the English people that they demanded in due course the works of Bunyan and Defoe. Or as a third proposition: Did the English Bible so influence Bunyan and both so influence Defoe that in the end the product was _Pamela_, the short tales of Diderot, the novels of Stendhal, Flaubert, and his successors and so on until the novel of to-day was arrived at? As I have said, I do not immensely care about the matter. Bunyan may never have read the Bible, Defoe may never have read Bunyan, or Richardson Defoe. But it makes such a convenient pattern to assume that writers are descended the one from the other that I mean to assume it and the reader must modify the theory how he will. Regarded from that point of view, in pre- as in post-Elizabethan days and underlying Elizabethan days themselves, you did have that stern but decorated prose and that determination to rely on illustrations, parables, and images drawn solely from material to be found about normal people the world over and throughout time; simultaneously, on the surface of things you had a courtlier and more elaborated prose which had the Sublime as its ideal and nothing less vulgar than passages modelled on Juvenal or the plays of Plautus for its light relief. The Bible says: “Take us the little foxes, the foxes that eat our grapes” as an illustration of love, and “He shall feed his sheep” as the highest expression of the divine functionings of the Saviour. The _Faerie Queene_ cannot deal with any fox or any hound of lower extraction than Cerberus and the only redeemer who could have saved the world for the writers of Romances was, in his panoply, King Arthur with Lancelot, Gawain, and the rest of his apostles all pricking over the plains of Camelot. So let us say that it was to the homespun illustrations, the simple imagery and the stern diction of the Bible that we owe Bunyan--for obviously Bunyan read the Scriptures, year in and year out, during a lifetime of Bedford Gaol, of persecution and turmoil, whereas the only remains of the courtlier modes are found to come from North’s _Plutarch_ which influenced profoundly Shakespeare and possibly Sir Thomas Browne. But Shakespeare obviously could not have any successors and Browne found none till R. L. S. came to be his sedulous ape. So that the influence of North’s translation remained, if profound, at least rather ethical than literary--until it was finally ousted by the versions of the Langhornes and Church’s of days much more modern.