James of Compostella, of which he himself has recently given
us so lively and amusing a metrical version.

Mr. Southey introduces the following just eulogium on our classic of
the common people:

"Bunyan was confident in his own powers of expression; he
says--

--thine only way
Before them all, is to say out thy say
In thine own native language, which no man
Now useth, nor with ease dissemble can.

And he might well be confident in it. His is a homespun style,
not a manufactured one; and what a difference is there between
its homeliness, and the flippant vulgarity of the Roger
L'Estrange and Tom Brown school! If it is not a well of
English undefiled to which the poet as well as the philologist
must repair, if they would drink of the living waters, it is a
clear stream of current English--the vernacular speech of his
age, sometimes indeed in its rusticity and coarseness, but
always in its plainness and its strength. To this natural
style Bunyan is in some degree beholden for his general
popularity;--his language is every where level to the must
ignorant reader, and to the meanest capacity: there is a
homely reality about it; a nursery tale is not more
intelligible, in its manner of narration, to a child. Another
cause of his popularity is, that he taxes the imagination as
little as the understanding. The vividness of his own, which,