No. This will not do. The Epistles of St. Paul were truth of truths to Paul, but they do not attract us to the man who wrote them, and, except here and there, they are very uninteresting. Mere strength of conviction on a writer’s part is not enough to make his work take permanent rank. Yet I know that I could read the whole of _The Pilgrim’s Progress_ (except occasional episodical sermons) without being at all bored by it, whereas, having spent a penny upon Mr. Stead’s abridgement of _Joseph Andrews_, I had to give it up as putting me out of all patience. I then spent another penny on an abridgement of _Gulliver’s Travels_, and was enchanted by it. What is it that makes one book so readable and another so unreadable? Swift, from all I can make out, was a far more human and genuine person than he is generally represented, but I do not think I should have liked him, whereas Fielding, I am sure, must have been delightful. Why do the faults of his work overweigh its many great excellences, while the less great excellences of the _Voyage to Lilliput_ outweigh its more serious defects? I suppose it is the prolixity of Fielding that fatigues me. Swift is terse, he gets through what he has to say on any matter as quickly as he can and takes the reader on to the next, whereas Fielding is not only long, but his length is made still longer by the disconnectedness of the episodes that appear to have been padded into the books—episodes that do not help one forward, and are generally so exaggerated, and often so full of horse-play as to put one out of conceit with the parts that are really excellent. Whatever else Bunyan is he is never long; he takes you quickly on from incident to incident and, however little his incidents may appeal to us, we feel that he is never giving us one that is not _bona fide_ so far as he is concerned. His episodes and incidents are introduced not because he wants to make his book longer but because he cannot be satisfied without these particular ones, even though he may feel that his book is getting longer than he likes. . . . And here I must break away from this problem, leaving it unsolved. [1897.] Bunyan and the _Odyssey_