fewest and simplest words; "powerful and picturesque," writes Hallam,
"from concise simplicity." Bunyan's style is recommended by Lord
Macaulay as an invaluable study to every person who wishes to gain a wide
command over his mother tongue. Its vocabulary is the vocabulary of the
common people. "There is not," he truly says, "in 'The Pilgrim's
Progress' a single expression, if we except a few technical terms of
theology, that would puzzle the rudest peasant." We may, look through
whole pages, and not find a word of more than two syllables. Nor is the
source of this pellucid clearness and imaginative power far to seek.
Bunyan was essentially a man of one book, and that book the very best,
not only for its spiritual teaching but for the purity of its style, the
English Bible. "In no book," writes Mr. J. R. Green, "do we see more
clearly than in 'The Pilgrim's Progress' the new imaginative force which
had been given to the common life of Englishmen by their study of the
Bible. Bunyan's English is the simplest and homeliest English that has
ever been used by any great English writer, but it is the English of the
Bible. His images are the images of prophet and evangelist. So
completely had the Bible become Bunyan's life that one feels its phrases
as the natural expression of his thoughts. He had lived in the Bible
till its words became his own."

All who have undertaken to take an estimate of Bunyan's literary genius
call special attention to the richness of his imaginative power. Few
writers indeed have possessed this power in so high a degree. In
nothing, perhaps, is its vividness more displayed than in the reality of
its impersonations. The _dramatis persons_ are not shadowy abstractions,
moving far above us in a mystical world, or lay figures ticketed with
certain names, but solid men and women of our own flesh and blood, living
in our own everyday world, and of like passions with ourselves. Many of
them we know familiarly; there is hardly one we should be surprised to