bells in the city ringing again for joy; the Dreamer's glimpse of its glories through the opened portals--is not every stage of the journey, every scene of the pilgrimage, indelibly printed on our memories, for our warning, our instruction, our encouragement in the race we, as much as they, have each one to run? Have we not all, again and again, shared the Dreamer's feelings--"After that they shut up the Gates; which, when I had seen, I wished myself among them," and prayed, God helping us, that our "dangerous journey"--ever the most dangerous when we see its dangers the least--might end in our "safe arrival at the desired country"? "The Pilgrim's Progress" exhibits Bunyan in the character by which he would have most desired to be remembered, as one of the most influential of Christian preachers. Hallam, however, claims for him another distinction which would have greatly startled and probably shocked him, as the father of our English novelists. As an allegorist Bunyan had many predecessors, not a few of whom, dating from early times, had taken the natural allegory of the pilgrimage of human life as the basis of their works. But as a novelist he had no one to show him the way. Bunyan was the first to break ground in a field which has since then been so overabundantly worked that the soil has almost lost its productiveness; while few novels written purely with the object of entertainment have ever proved so universally entertaining. Intensely religious as it is in purpose, "The Pilgrim's Progress" may be safely styled the first English novel. "The claim to be the father of English romance," writes Dr. Allon, "which has been sometimes preferred for Defoe, really pertains to Bunyan. Defoe may claim the parentage of a species, but Bunyan is the creator of the genus." As the parent of fictitious biography it is that Bunyan has charmed the world. On its vivid interest as a story, its universal interest and lasting vitality rest. "Other allegorises," writes Lord Macaulay, "have shown great ingenuity, but no other allegorist has ever been able to touch the heart, and to make its abstractions objects of terror, of pity, and of love." Whatever its deficiencies, literary and religious, may be; if we find incongruities in the narrative, and are not insensible to some grave theological deficiencies; if we are unable without qualification to accept Coleridge's dictum that it is "incomparably the best 'Summa Theologiae Evangelicae' ever produced by a writer not miraculously inspired;" even if, with Hallam, we consider its "excellencies great indeed, but not of the highest order," and deem it "a little over-praised," the fact of its universal popularity with readers of all classes and of all orders of intellect remains, and gives this book a unique distinction. "I have," says Dr. Arnold, when reading it after a long interval, "always been struck by its piety. I am now struck equally or even more by its profound wisdom.