into a pit and being dashed to pieces with Vain Confidence, of being drowned in the flooded meadows with Christian and Hopeful; of sinking in deep water when swimming over a river, going down and rising up half dead, and needing all his companion's strength and skill to keep his head above the stream. Vanity Fair is evidently drawn from the life. The great yearly fair of Stourbridge, close to Cambridge, which Bunyan had probably often visited in his tinker days, with its streets of booths filled with "wares of all kinds from all countries," its "shows, jugglings, cheats games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of every kind," its "great one of the fair," its court of justice and power of judgment, furnished him with the materials for his picture. Scenes like these he draws with sharp defined outlines. When he had to describe what he only knew by hearsay, his pictures are shadowy and cold. Never having been very far from home, he had had no experience of the higher types of beauty and grandeur in nature, and his pen moves in fetters when he attempts to describe them. When his pilgrims come to the Hill Difficulty and the Delectable Mountains, the difference is at once seen. All his nobler imagery is drawn from Scripture. As Hallam has remarked, "There is scarcely a circumstance or metaphor in the Old Testament which does not find a place bodily and literally in 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' and this has made his imagination appear more creative than it really is."