So, too, the religious element and the allegory _are_ too prominent in _The Holy War_--the novelist's desk is made too much of a pulpit in large parts of it.

Other parts, concerning the inhabitants of Mansoul and their private affairs, are domestic novel-writing of nearly the pure kind: and if _The Pilgrim's Progress_ did not exist, it would be worth while to pick them out and discuss them.

But, as it most fortunately does exist, this is not needful.
[5] The heroic kind had lent itself very easily and obviously to allegory.

Not very long before Bunyan English literature had been enriched with a specimen of this double variety which for Sir W.Raleigh "marks the lowest depth to which English romance writing sank." I do not know that I could go quite so far as this in regard to the book--_Bentivolio and Urania_ by Nathaniel Ingelo.

The first edition of this appeared in 1660: the second (there seem to have been at least four) lies before me at this moment dated 1669, or nine years before the _Progress_ itself.
You require a deep-sea-lead of uncommonly cunning construction to sound, register, and compare the profundities of the bathos in novels.