four boys with their wives and children, it is true, stay behind awhile,
but there is an evident incongruity in their doing so when the allegory
has brought them all to what stands for the close of their earthly
pilgrimage. Bunyan's mistake was in gratifying his inventive genius and
making his band of pilgrims so large. He could get them together and
make them travel in company without any sacrifice of dramatic truth,
which, however, he was forced to disregard when the time came for their
dismissal. The exquisite pathos of the description of the passage of the
river by Christian and Hopeful blinds us to what may be almost termed the
impossibility of two persons passing through the final struggle together,
and dying at the same moment, but this charm is wanting in the prosaic
picture of the company of fellow-travellers coming down to the water's
edge, and waiting till the postman blows his horn and bids them cross.
Much as the Second Part contains of what is admirable, and what no one
but Bunyan could have written, we feel after reading it that, in Mr.
Froude's words, the rough simplicity is gone, and has been replaced by a
tone of sentiment which is almost mawkish. "Giants, dragons, and angelic
champions carry us into a spurious fairyland where the knight-errant is a
preacher in disguise. Fair ladies and love-matches, however decorously
chastened, suit ill with the sternness of the mortal conflict between the
soul and sin." With the acknowledged shortcomings of the Second Part of
"The Pilgrim's Progress," we may be well content that Bunyan never
carried out the idea hinted at in the closing words of his allegory:
"Shall it be my lot to go that way again, I may give those that desire it
an account of what I am here silent about; in the meantime I bid my
reader--Adieu."

Bunyan's second great allegorical work, "The Holy War," need not detain
us long. Being an attempt, and in the nature of things an unsuccessful
attempt, to clothe what writers on divinity call "the plan of salvation"