They were compelled to own that the ignorant multitude had judged more correctly than the learned, and that the despised little book was really a masterpiece.

Bunyan is indeed as decidedly the first of allegorists, as Demosthenes is the first of orators, or Shakspeare the first of dramatists.

Other allegorists have shown equal ingenuity but no other allegorist has ever been able to touch the heart, and to make abstractions objects of terror, of pity, and of love.

[255] It may be doubted whether any English Dissenter had suffered more severely under the penal laws than John Bunyan.

Of the twenty-seven years which had elapsed since the Restoration, he had passed twelve in confinement.