Bunyan has been described as a tall, red-haired man, stern of countenance,
quick of eye, and mild of speech. His mildness of speech, I fancy, must
have been an acquired mildness. He loved swearing as a boy, and, as _The
Pilgrim's Progress_ shows, even in his later life he had not lost the
humour of calling names. No other English author has ever invented a name
of the labelling kind equal to that of Mr. Worldly Wiseman--a character,
by the way, who does not appear in the first edition of _The Pilgrim's
Progress_, but came in later as an afterthought. Congreve's "Tribulation
Spintext" and Dickens's "Lord Frederick Verisopht" are mere mechanical
contrivances compared to this triumph of imagination and phrase. Bunyan's
gift for names was in its kind supreme. His humorous fancy chiefly took
that form. Even atheists can read him with pleasure for the sake of his
names. The modern reader, no doubt, often smiles at these names where
Bunyan did not mean him to smile, as when Mrs. Lightmind says: "I was
yesterday at Madam Wantons, when we were as merry as the maids. For who do
you think should be there but I and Mrs. Love-the-flesh, and three or four
more, with Mr. Lechery, Mrs. Filth, and some others?" Bunyan's
fancifulness, however, gives us pleasure quite apart from such quaint
effects as this. How delightful is Mr. By-ends's explanation of the two
points in regard to which he and his family differ in religion from those
of the stricter sort: "First, we never strive against wind and tide.
Secondly, we are always most zealous when Religion goes in his silver
slippers; we love much to walk with him in the street, if the sun shines,
and the people applaud him." What a fine grotesque, again, Bunyan gives us
in toothless Giant Pope sitting in the mouth of the cave, and, though too
feeble to follow Christian, calling out after him: "You will never mend
till more of you be burnt." We do not read _The Pilgrim's Progress_,
however, as a humorous book. Bunyan's pains mean more to us than the play
of his fancy. His books are not seventeenth-century grotesques, but the