And this is well seen of Christian.
The Slough of Despond and the terrible overhanging hill; the gateway and the Interpreter's House and the House Beautiful; the ups and downs of the road, and the arbours and the giants' dens: Beulah and the Delectable Mountains:--one knows them as one knows the country that one has walked over, and perhaps even better.

There is no description for description's sake: yet nothing is wanting of the descriptive kind.
Yet all these things are--as they should be--only subsidiary to the main interest of the Pilgrimage itself.

Once more, one may fear that it is no good sign of the wits of the age that readers should be unable to discard familiarity with the argument of the story.

It is the way in which that argument is worked out and illustrated that is the thing.

I have never myself, since I became thoroughly acquainted with Lydgate's Englishing of Deguilevile's _Pilgrimage of the Soul of Man_, had any doubt that--in some way or other, direct or indirect, at tenth or twentieth hand perhaps--Bunyan was acquainted with it: but this is of no importance.