dint of his sanctified and soaring imagination and his exquisite style,
he stands forth the peer of the foremost men in the intellectual world.
And thus it is that the great unlettered religious world possesses in
John Bunyan all but all that the select and scholarly world possesses in
Dante. Both Dante and Bunyan devoted their splendid gifts to the noblest
of services--the service of spiritual, and especially of personal
religion; but for one appreciative reader that Dante has had Bunyan has
had a hundred. Happy in being so like his Master in so many things,
Bunyan is happy in being like his unlettered Master in this also, that
the common people hear him gladly and never weary of hearing him.

It gives by far its noblest interest to Dante's noble book that we have
Dante himself in every page of his book. Dante is taken down into Hell,
he is then led up through _Purgatory_, and after that still up and up
into the very Paradise of God. But that hell all the time is the hell
that Dante had dug and darkened and kindled for himself. In the
Purgatory, again, we see Dante working out his own salvation with fear
and trembling, God all the time working in Dante to will and to do of His
good pleasure. And then the Paradise, with all its sevenfold glory, is
just that place and that life which God hath prepared for them that love
Him and serve Him as Dante did. And so it is in the _Holy War_. John
Bunyan is in the _Pilgrim's Progress_, but there are more men and other
men than its author in that rich and populous book, and other experiences
and other attainments than his. But in the _Holy War_ we have Bunyan
himself as fully and as exclusively as we have Dante in the _Divine
Comedy_. In the first edition of the _Holy War_ there is a frontispiece
conceived and executed after the anatomical and symbolical manner which
was so common in that day, and which is to be seen at its perfection in
the English edition of Jacob Behmen. The frontispiece is a full-length
likeness of the author of the _Holy War_, with his whole soul laid open