getting-on (in which he might well have been taken as a model by Samuel
Smiles). One thinks of him sometimes as a sort of Deacon Brodie, sometimes
as the most innocent sinner who ever lived. For, though he was brutal and
snobbish and self-seeking and simian, he had a pious and a merry and a
grateful heart. He felt that God had created the world for the pleasure of
Samuel Pepys, and had no doubt that it was good.




II.--JOHN BUNYAN


Once, when John Bunyan had been preaching in London, a friend
congratulated him on the excellence of his sermon. "You need not remind me
of that," replied Bunyan. "The Devil told me of it before I was out of the
pulpit." On another occasion, when he was going about in disguise, a
constable who had a warrant for his arrest spoke to him and inquired if he
knew that devil Bunyan. "Know him?" said Bunyan. "You might call him a
devil if you knew him as well as I once did." We have in these anecdotes a
key to the nature of Bunyan's genius. He was a realist, a romanticist, and
a humourist. He was as exact a realist (though in a different way) as Mr.
Pepys, whose contemporary he was. He was a realist both in his
self-knowledge and in his sense of the outer world. He had the acute eye
of the artist which was aware of the stones of the street and the crows in
the ploughed field. As a preacher, he did not guide the thoughts of his
hearers, as so many preachers do, into the wind. He recalled them from
orthodox abstractions to the solid earth. "Have you forgot," he asked his
followers, "the close, the milk-house, the stable, the barn, and the like,
where God did visit your souls?" He himself could never be indifferent to