From The Spectator.

THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.*

What, for instance, is the difference between the City of Destruction, which Christian leaves, and Vanity Fair, which he reaches near the end of his journey? He seems to start from the world, or unregenerate life, and to come again to it. How is it that Faithful has passed by the House Beautiful without entering it, and that Hopeful does not even need to climb the Hill Difficulty? Indeed, this last fact seems to show that Vanity Fair is nearer to the Celestial City than the House Beautiful itself, the pilgrim from Vanity Fair not having to pass through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. The confusion is the more remarkable as Ignorance is carried away to hell even from the gates of heaven because he entered not in at the wicket-gate. It is a minor but a considerable incongruity that Faithful and Hopeful have no burdens, unless we assume that these have dropped off before they met Christian. Probably, however, it is safer to believe that Bunyan wrote for a class of men

MR. MACMILLAN's beautiful and scholarly reprint of The Pilgrim's Progress may be taken as curious evidence of the position which the Baptist minister has won for himself among the wise of all time. We have had true people's editions, published more than a century ago, with grotesque pictures of Apollyon and Giant Despair, and sham people's editions of later times, with exquisitely feeble engravings and weak evangelical commentaries. Mr. Macmillan has judged wisely in giving a simple pocket edition, with clear type and good paper, scarcely any notes, and with no preface but the author's. The fact is that The Pilgrim's Progress, like the Bible or Shakspeare, belongs to spiritual regions, where mere criticism is at fault, and where those who have eaten their bread in tears have the highest artistic insight. True feeling revolts from a garrulous revelation of its own experience, and immature feeling is an impertinence. who cared little for artistic symmetry so long For a single man, therefore, deliberately to sit down and expound Shakspeare or Goethe, tracing their genius in its wanderings and sounding it in its depths, is a misapplication of time and powers that ought to be devoted to some handicraft, or at most to the mechanical drudgery of literature. Science can give us casts and photographs but not statues or pictures. On the other hand, any one who will be content to read a great poem body. Accordingly, in Vanity Fair we must reverently, and to examine the new forms of life which have risen up before him as he read it, may find something worth telling to the world. A critic who would collect the best essays upon Dante, such as Mr. Church's, or Mr. Carlyle's, and would add Mr. Ruskin's chapter on the landscape of the Divine Commedia, would contribute more to a true knowledge of the great medieval epic than by any conceivable amount of commentary. The essay, however weak it may be, at least examines the thought, and notes only traverse the details of style and execution.

Probably every one who reads the "Pilgrim's Progress" is struck by the incongruities of the author's plan. Taking only the first and most perfect part it is difficult to construct a consistent idea of the allegory.

*The Pilgrim's Progress. By John Bunyan. Golden Treasury Series. Cambridge: Macmillan and Co.

as every part was vivid and complete in itself. The Puritan's conception of the wicked world from which he had come out, and which had existed even when the saints were ruling the earth under Cromwell, was quite distinct from his idea of the wicked world in which Charles II. was king and Jeffreys judge. The sin that taints the soul was actually different from the sin that burns the

consider the streets and booths, the drunkards and rioters, as mere accessories to the bloody tribunal. We feel from the first that Christian is no longer among fellow-citizens, as he was in the City of Destruction, and there is even an artistic probability in the scenes of his old life meeting him again, the sins which he has left far behind him on the road, anew soliciting, and at last judging and condemning him. It is as disloyal subjects of Beelzebub, as men who have despised the law of their prince, that the pilgrims are brought to trial.

History is perhaps the best key to Bunyan's allegory. His work is the poem of all Protestantism, as all Catholicism is summed up in Dante. The symmetry of Dante's circles, spiral coil rising above spiral coil, the universality of the vision which saw all that time has made or shall make; the love that counted Ripheus a Christian, and the justice

that condemned master and friend to the un- when Bunyan fought as a trooper for the quenchable flames of hell, all reflect the Covenant and the Saints. But there is no magnificent philosophy of the times that bitterness in the satire, and no vindictive dealt with the future and the invisible as vain-glorying in the memories. Bunyan is freely as with the present and the things of against the Lord's foes, but he is without earth. But in virtue of this very greatness personal enmity, and as he remembers the the human element is comparatively ob- trumpet sound, he does not seem to recall scured throughout, the men and women that he heard it on the fields where the Man whom we meet in the fiery gulfs of the In- of Sin and his perfumed courtiers were erno, or in the twilight of purgatory, are beaten back. Yet his religion is not the rather representatives of a class, instances faith which leads to quiet homes and a of a sin, known to us in some typical act or tranquil routine of devotion. He had lived speech, than many-sided in their strength in times when a Church, all the more intoland weaknesses like life. Francesca da erant because its differences were slight, had Rimini, Ugolino, Ulysses, are love, hatred, tried to impose a mechanical compliance with and craft, eminent each of its kind but un- its liturgy, and had kindled a worse than mixed. Bunyan's world is strangely differ- Marian persecution for the creed of Charles ent. His faith is not weaker than Dante's, II. and Buckingham. He had seen sixty or his vision dimmer. But he writes from thousand of his countrymen hunted from the heart and from his own life; the problem hiding-place to hiding-place, rotting to death of existence for him is no questioning on the divine order, but the cry of his soul to be saved. Sometimes the cross which guides his way seems to narrow his horizon, and he dooms Ignorance to hell with no touch of that gracious compunction which led Dante to create a shadowy Elysium on the very shores of the abyss for the souls of the great who had not known Christ. But we gain in intensity what we lose in width. Dante, after all, gives us Heaven as the best men imagine it, and Bunyan describes man as God's Spirit has renewed him. The individual life, with its despondencies and doubts, its counsel sought from Mr. Legality, its casuistry with By-ends, its meditative discussions, its passage through hell and the world, and its far-off glimpses of heaven is before us as one of God's noblest servants lived it. The pilgrim and the straight path make up the book.

in foul gaols, sent to the plantations as slaves, or sworn to death falsely for speaking differently as they prayed, from Sheldon and Titus Oates. The iron of captivity had entered into his own soul, and his wife had been insulted when she appealed for him. A little compliance with legal ordinances, an acquiescence in moderately good institutions, and silence on one or two subjects for which his heart burned would have procured him and his fellows ample toleration to think. There was no question now of driving them to church. Their opposition was profitless, and their numbers were gradually growing small as the faint-hearted and the worldly failed from them. They were not called upon to buy the wares of Vanity Fair. Only, if like By-ends, they would "jump in their judgment with the present way of the times," "liking that religion best that would stand with the security of God's good blessings," A man starting from the history of his they might live sober and moral lives, talkown experiences would generally become ing in biblical phraseology, doing works of vulgar and egotistical. Half the hatred charity, and only lying to their own souls and which the religious world complains of en- to God. At the distance of almost two cencountering is provoked by its own habit of turies, the heart warms to think that so displaying its inner life as a stage property. many thousand unlettered men were found But Bunyan was too full of the apostolical to die obscurely in Christ's cause. "How spirit to obtrude himself into his work. We to make the best of both worlds," as a handmay trace here and there an allusion to the times, a triumph which the Revolution pres*ently justified over the decay of Giant Pope, and a reminiscence of Twisden in Lord Hategood. In the plenitude of military illustration we may see recollections of the day

book of popular religion puts it; "How to serve God and Mammon," as was said more crudely in Galilee, was a thought that never flashed on the Baptist tinker. His idealism is the grander for its unconscious simplicity. Christian flying from wife and children may

make every other sacrifice easily. He has left what made life beautiful behind him, but he is travelling toward the city that shines as the sun. The voice of Evangelist has been the destiny overruling earthly affections, and the antagonism of spirit and flesh, begun in a harsh separation, justifies himself by the pilgrim's gradual exaltation above his old belongings. By the time Christian has reached the river, we feel that a world would have parted him from his wife, even had the voice of Heaven allowed him to end his days in the city where he was born.

can have contemplated rest upon earth even in a dream. Apart from the inimitable style, the chief merit of this part, perhaps, lies in showing how completely Bunyan had mastered the language and modes of thought usual among women, and how highly he valued them. The passage in which Gaius rehearses the ministrations of women upon our Lord is a noble advance on the conventional sentiment of the times, and may fairly be quoted as proof how far Puritan Christianity was in advance of Cavalier civilization. After all, the substantial failure of the work is not much to be regretted or Perhaps, when all is said, it was partly wondered at. Beautiful and noble as a tranthe desire to vindicate Christian that led sitional form, English Puritanism wanted Bunyan to conduct Mercy and her children | the insight, the width, and the culture which in a second part to the Celestial City. How- are demanded for immortality. It had lived ever it may have arisen, the idea was unfor- grandly in Cromwell and Milton, and it pertunate. Commonly, where the allegory of ished-perhaps with a higher beauty before the first part is not reproduced it is violated. God-in Baxter and Bunyan. Whether The idea of sending an escort with Christian and her children is the very negation of all Protestant independency. Greatheart is in fact a spiritual director. The land of Beulah, in which the pilgrims await a summons across the river, is another strange departure from the original conception; and it is difficult to understand how a man like Bunyan

there was in Bunyan himself the germ of an unxepressed, undeveloped thought, of something higher than his own epic, must remain a mystery, but we are inclined to believe that, in this as in other cases, the artist's great work was nobler than himself; or is it that the moment of inspiration comes only once in a lifetime?

Shakspeare. A Reprint of the Collected Works | condition more or less of defacement or repair, as first Published in 1623. Part I. containing would be considered cheap at a hundred.' the Comedies. Booth.

This "cheerful semblance" of the First Folio ought to be in the library of every lover of Shakspeare, upon whose shelves a copy of the goodly volume issued by Isaac Jaggars and Edward Blount in 1623 is not to be found.Notes and Queries.

OFTEN have zealous students and judicious admirers of Shakspeare, when vexed with the controversies of angry commentators, ex claimed, "Oh, for a copy of the First Folio!" What they have so longed for is now before them. We have here the writings of our great Bard just as his loving friends Heminge and WHEN David Bruce, the Moravian missionCondell (that "payre so carefull to show their ary amongst the Wampanno Indians, was drawgratitude both to the living and the dead")ing near to death, he called his dusky disciples presented them to their noble patrons, the Earl of Pembroke and the Earl of Montgomery: and truly, what with the form of the letter used, the tint of the paper, the limp vellum wrapper, and the manner in which the general character of the editio princeps has been imitated, one feels almost disposed to believe, as we turn over page after page, and read passage after passage in the orthography of James' time, that one is the fortunate possessor of a First Folio. Rightly and wisely has Mr. Booth acted in retaining the very errors of the original; and it is no vain boast when he declares, that "henceforth for less than two pounds may be secured, in a perfect state, the coveted of all English book-collectors-a volume, which in the original, and in

about him in the mission-house, and pressed their hands to his bosom, and with many counsels bade them farewell. And so fell asleep. There was no white men there besides, but the devout Indians made great lamentations over him, and buried him as well as they knew how in their Indian fashion. The funeral procession consisted of two canoes, with which they paddled him across the Lake of Grace-Gnaden-See-to their Indian burial-ground; old Father Gideon, one of his native converts, making a "powerful discourse" at the grave. And last spring when the Moravians came looking for the grave, they found the body in a sitting posture, Indian fashion, resting in hope.Independent, 20 Oct., 1859.

From The Spectator. THEBES: ITS TOMBS AND THEIR TENANTS.*

| failed to give us one very interesting picture of what he saw

"Down in the chambers of the Kings of old."

The chapter in which this occurs is entitled "The Unrifled Tomb of a Theban Dignitary," and the value of the discovery is much

the

How much additional information has been contributed by Mr. Rhind to the history of Egyptian sepulture it is not easy to determine without a more extensive study of the subject than we have been able to un-enhanced by the fact that all the vaults of the dertake. We should, however, be disposed Necropolis have been exposed to two distinct kinds of spoliation. For the old Egypto say that the object of the present work is to show rather how little can be known, than tians themselves, what time their faith beto advertise the author's own discoveries. gan to wax cold, and their rites of sepulture Undertaking a series of excavations on the had degenerated into mere forms, fell into ground recently explored by numerous French easy habit of ejecting the mummies of and English archæologists, he seems to have their ancestors, and appropriating the tombs been animated by the hope of acquiring some of their own families. It is not impossible, which had contained them to the sepulture insight into the real significance of Egyptian however, that this practice may have obtained rites, and of being able to explain their pe- to some extent even during the ages of faith. culiarities on philosophical principles. In this design he frankly confesses he has falied; ture of credulity and irreverence which is For nothing is more curious than the admixand though he does not absolutely assert that observable in certain nations of the world. there are no grounds for anticipating that fu- We see it in the Chinese of to-day, who actture excavators may be more successful, he ually flout their own idols, while apparently evidently thinks that the prospect is far from being promising. The class of remains to attributes. And as we read that among the as much persuaded as ever of their divine which he chiefly looked to throw a light oldest Egyptians it was customary for a man upon the above points are sepulchral inscriptions and decorations of an ampler difficult to say what limits would be imposed to borrow money on his father's corpse, it is character, and perhaps some contemporary by superstition on acts which seem shocking exegesis of the ritualistic books, of which to ourselves. And so far from this pecuniary specimens have been given in translation by transaction implying any species of sceptiSir Gardiner Wilkinson. Mr. Rhind, how-cism, an uninterred mummy was held to be ever, does not profess to have made any advance in this direction; and his highly interesting chapter upon the various hypotheses which have been propounded on the subject,

is critical and not constructive.

Our readers will see, therefore, that Mr. Rhind's work is one of a totally different stamp from that of Sir Gardiner Wilkinson's Ancient Egyptians, or his Handbook of Egypt and Thebes. It is more speculative and less descriptive. We meet in it with few or none of those vivid pictorial passages which form one of the chief attractions of the former works; nor does it emulate them in

the departments of natural history or topography. Still Mr. Rhind had his successes as an explorer, and though in describing what he found he lacks the purely literary powers of the books above mentioned, he has not

*Thebes: its Tombs and their Tenants, Ancient and Present, including a Record of Excavations in the Necropolis. By A. Henry Rhind. London: Longmans and Co.

the son who kept a parent out of his proper one of the best securities for a loan, because funeral rites for any length of time was held guilty of the grossest impiety, and ran the the officiating priests. This deprivation was risk of being refused interment himself by supposed to have the same effect as was reThe soul of an unburied body was excluded puted to attend it by the Greeks and Romans. from the shores of heaven :

"Nec ripas datur horrendas et rauca fluenta, Transportare prius quam sedibus ossa quierunt."

rites was implied by one species of familiarSo that, as no doubt of the efficacy of funeral ity, it is possible that none was by another. balmment and careful preservation of the body Of course, on the hypothesis that the emsprung from a belief in the resurrection of the body, this reasoning is worthless. But then Mr. Rhind rejects this hypothesis. So let it stand for whatever it is worth.