All who have undertaken to take an estimate of Bunyan's literary genius call special attention to the richness of his imaginative power. Few writers indeed have possessed this power in so high a degree. In nothing, perhaps, is its vividness more displayed than in the reality of its impersonations. The _dramatis persons_ are not shadowy abstractions, moving far above us in a mystical world, or lay figures ticketed with certain names, but solid men and women of our own flesh and blood, living in our own everyday world, and of like passions with ourselves. Many of them we know familiarly; there is hardly one we should be surprised to meet any day. This lifelike power of characterization belongs in the highest degree to "The Pilgrim's Progress." It is hardly inferior in "The Holy War," though with some exceptions the people of "Mansoul" have failed to engrave themselves on the popular memory as the characters of the earlier allegory have done. The secret of this graphic power, which gives "The Pilgrim's Progress" its universal popularity, is that Bunyan describes men and women of his own day, such as he had known and seen them. They are not fancy pictures, but literal portraits. Though the features may be exaggerated, and the colours laid on with an unsparing brush, the outlines of his bold personifications are truthfully drawn from his own experience. He had had to do with every one of them. He could have given a personal name to most of them, and we could do the same to many. We are not unacquainted with Mr Byends of the town of Fair Speech, who "always has the luck to jump in his judgment with the way of the times, and to get thereby," who is zealous for Religion "when he goes in his silver slippers," and "loves to walk with him in the streets when the sun shines and the people applaud him." All his kindred and surroundings are only too familiar to us--his wife, that very virtuous woman my Lady Feigning's daughter, my Lord Fair-speech, my Lord Time-server, Mr. Facingbothways, Mr. Anything, and the Parson of the Parish, his mother's own brother by the father's side, Mr. Twotongues. Nor is his schoolmaster, one Mr. Gripeman, of the market town of Lovegain, in the county of Coveting, a stranger to us. Obstinate, with his dogged determination and stubborn common-sense, and Pliable with his shallow impressionableness, are among our acquaintances. We have, before now, come across "the brisk lad Ignorance from the town of Conceit," and have made acquaintance with Mercy's would-be suitor, Mr. Brisk, "a man of some breeding and that pretended to religion, but who stuck very close to the world." The man Temporary who lived in a town two miles off from Honesty, and next door to Mr. Turnback; Formalist and Hypocrisy, who were "from the land of Vainglory, and were going for praise to Mount Sion"; Simple, Sloth, and Presumption, "fast asleep by the roadside with fetters on their heels," and their companions, Shortwind, Noheart,