If the last six books, which are said to have been
destroyed in Ireland, had been preserved, we doubt whether any heart less
stout than that of a commentator would have held out to the end.
It is not so with the Pilgrim's Progress. That wonderful book, while it
obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who
are too simple to admire it. Doctor Johnson, all whose studies were
desultory, and who hated, as he said, to read books through, made an
exception in favour of the Pilgrim's Progress. That work, he said, was one
of the two or three works which he wished longer. It was by no common
merit that the illiterate sectary extracted praise like this from the most
pedantic of critics, and the most bigoted of tories. In the wildest parts
of Scotland the Pilgrim's Progress is the delight of the peasantry. In
every nursery the Pilgrim's Progress is a greater favourite than Jack the
Giant-Killer. Every reader knows the straight and narrow path as well as
he knows a road in which he has gone backward and forward a hundred times.
This is the highest miracle of genius,--that things which are not should
be as though they were,--that the imaginations of one mind should become
the personal recollections of another.
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