The book has about 400 folio pages very closely packed with type, besides an alphabetical index full of Hebrew and Greek derivations of its names--"Gnothisauton," "Achamoth," "Ametameletus," "Dogmapernes," and so forth.

Its principles are inexorably virtuous; there is occasional action interspersed among its innumerable discourses, and I think it not improbable that if it were only possible to read it, it might do one some good.

But it would not be the good of the novel.
The only fault with the novel-character of the greater book which might possibly be found by a critic who did not let the allegory bite him, and was not frightened by the religion, is that there is next to no love element in it, though there are wedding bells.

Mercy is indeed quite nice enough for a heroine: but Bunyan might have bestowed her better than on a young gentleman so very young that he had not long before made himself (no doubt allegorically) ill with unripe and unwholesome fruit.
But if he had done so, the suspicions of his brethren--_they_ were acute enough as it was not to mistake the character of the book, whatever modern critics may do--would have been even more unallayable.

And, as it is, the "alluring countenance" does shed not a little grace upon the story, or at least upon the Second Part: while the intenser character of the First hardly requires this.