His
rude oratory roused and melted hearers who listened without interest
to the labored discourses of great logicians and Hebraists. His
works were widely circulated among the humbler classes. One of them,
the Pilgrim's Progress, was in his own lifetime translated into
several foreign languages. It was, however, scarcely known to the
learned and polite, and had been during nearly a century the delight
of pious cottagers and artisans before it was publicly commended by
any man of high literary eminence. At length critics condescended to
inquire where the secret of so wide and so durable a popularity lay.
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.
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.
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