But this great praise was not abstracted from Macaulay by wealth of antique learning, universal accuracy of information, or vivid portraiture of forgotten civilizations. There was no trace of Bun-yan's perfect familiarity with Plato and Euripides, with Galen, Paracelsus, Plautus, Seneca, and the long line of authors down to Boccaccio, Rabelais, Saxo-Grammaticus, and the rest! The critic did not find in Bunyan's pages the careful diction of a scholar, the sonorous speech of the ancients, or the elegant and punctilious Norman of the court. "The Bunyan vocabulary," says Macaulay, "is the vocabulary of the common people. There is not an expression, if we except a few technical theological terms, which would puzzle the rudest peasant." In short, we need not pause, marvelous as are the pages of the "Pilgrim's Progress," to ask of John Bunyan, as indeed we must ask of William Shakespeare, the question, "how knoweth this man letters, having never learned?" Peerless as the result all is, there is nothing in the writings of John Bunyan which can not be accounted for by natural (that is to say, by what we have been obliged by the course of human experience to accept as not impossible) causes. "The years of Bunyan's boyhood were those during which the Puritan spirit was in the highest vigor over all England.... It is not wonderful, therefore, that a lad to whom nature had given a powerful imagination and sensibility which amounted to a disease, should have been early haunted by religious terrors. Before he was ten, his sports {166}were interrupted by fits of remorse and despair, and bis sleep disturbed by dreams of fiends trying to fly away with him.... He enters the Parliamentary army, and, to the last, he loves to draw his illustrations of sacred things from camps and fortresses, guns, trumpets, flags of truce, and regiments arrayed, each under its own banner.... His 'Greatheart,' his 'Captain Boanerges,5 and his 'Captain Credence' are evidently portraits of which the originals were among those martial saints* who fought and expounded in Fairfax's army.... He had been five years a preacher when the Restoration put it in the power of the Cavaliers... to oppress the Dissenters.... he was flung into Bedford jail, with pen and paper for company, etc., etc. Here are the school and the experience, and the result is writings which show a keen mother wit, a great command of the homely mother tongue, an intimate knowledge of the English bible, and a vast and dearly bought spiritual experience." ** Moreover, here is a scholar like Macaulay striving to account for the extraordinary phenomenon of a "Pilgrim's Progress" written by a village tinker. But in the case of the at least equally extraordinary phenomenon of the Shakespearean drama, the creation of a village butcher, the scholar has not yet been born to the Shakespeareans who deems it necessary or profitable to try his hand at any such investigation. "Where did he get his material?"