sites of ancient cities and the famous fields where the great battles of
the world were lost and won. We all remember how Macaulay made a long
winter journey to see the Pass of Killiecrankie before he sat down to
write upon it; and Carlyle's magnificent battle-pieces are not all
imagination; even that wonderful writer had to see Frederick's
battlefields with his own eyes before he could trust himself to describe
them. And he tells us himself how Cromwell's splendid generalship all
came up before him as he looked down on the town of Dunbar and out upon
the ever-memorable country round about it. John Bunyan was not a great
historian; he was only a common soldier in the great Civil War of the
seventeenth century; but what would we not give for a description from
his vivid pen of the famous fields and the great sieges in which he took
part? What a find John Bunyan's 'Journals' and 'Letters Home from the
Seat of War' would be to our historians and to their readers! But, alas!
such journals and letters do not exist. Bunyan's complete silence in all
his books about the battles and the sieges he took his part in is very
remarkable, and his silence is full of significance. The Puritan soldier
keeps all his military experiences to work them all up into his _Holy
War_, the one and only war that ever kindled all his passions and filled
his every waking thought. But since John Bunyan was a man of genius,
equal in his own way to Cromwell and Milton themselves, if I were a
soldier I would keep ever before me the great book in which Bunyan's
experiences and observations and reflections as a soldier are all worked
up. I would set that classical book on the same shelf with Caesar's
_Commentaries_ and Napier's _Peninsula_, and Carlyle's glorious battle-
pieces. Even Caesar has been accused of too great dryness and coldness
in his Commentaries, but there is neither dryness nor coldness in John
Bunyan's _Holy War_. To read Bunyan kindles our cold civilian blood like
the waving of a banner and like the sound of a trumpet.