The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 17, No. 469, January 1, 1831

So up into the harmless air
Their bullets they did send;
And may all other duels have
That upshot in the end.

CUTS FROM HOOD'S COMIC ANNUAL

We next quote brief illustrations of the Cuts on the opposite page. It may be observed that the articles themselves have but little esprit, and that, unlike most occasions, the wit lies in the wood.

First is a Sonnet accompanying the cut "Infantry at Mess."

"Sweets to the sweet—farewell."—Hamlet.

Time was I liked a cheesecake well enough;
All human children have a sweetish tooth—
I used to revel in a pie or puff,
Or tart—we all are tarters in our youth;
To meet with jam or jelly was good luck,
All candies most complacently I cramped.
A stick of liquorice was good to suck,
And sugar was as often liked as lumped;
On treacle's "linked sweetness long drawn out,"
Or honey, I could feast like any fly,
I thrilled when lollipops were hawk'd about,
How pleased to compass hardbake or bull's eye,
How charmed if fortune in my power cast,
Elecampane—but that campaign is past.

"Picking his way," belongs to a day (April 17) in a "Scrape Book," with the motto of "Luck's all:"

"17th. Had my eye pick'd out by a pavior, who was axing his way, he didn't care where. Sent home in a hackney-chariot that upset. Paid Jarvis a sovereign for a shilling. My luck all over!"

The Schoolmaster's Motto, accompanying "Palmam qui meruit ferat!" is too long for extract.

The chief fun of the countryman and his Pigs lies in the cut.

Spirit Of The Public Journals

BUNYAN'S PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.[5 - Abridged from the paper on Southey's Life of Bunyan, in the last Quarterly Review.]

Of the first appearance of this celebrated parable, Mr. Southey's diligence has preserved the following notices:—

"'It is not known in what year the Pilgrim's Progress was first published, no copy of the first edition having as yet been discovered; the second is in the British Museum; it is "with additions," and its date is 1678; but as the book is known to have been written during Bunyan's imprisonment, which terminated in 1672, it was probably published before his release, or at latest immediately after it. The earliest with which Mr. Major has been able to supply me, either by means of his own diligent inquiries, or the kindness of his friends, is that "eighth e-di-ti-on" so humorously introduced by Gay, and printed—not for Ni-cho-las Bod-ding-ton, but for Nathanael Ponder, at the Peacock in the Poultrey, near the Church, 1682; for whom also the ninth was published in 1684, and the tenth in 1685. All these no doubt were large impressions.'

"When the astonishing success of the Pilgrim's Progress had raised a swarm of imitators, the author himself, according to the frequent fashion of the world, was accused of plagiarism, to which he made an indignant reply, in what he considered as verses, prefixed to his 'Holy War.'

'Some say the Pilgrim's Progress is not mine,
Insinuating as if I would shine
In name and fame by the worth of another,
Like some made rich by robbing of their brother;
Or that so fond I am of being Sire,
I'll father bastards; or if need require,
I'll tell a lye in print, to get applause.
I scorn it; John such dirt-heap never was
Since God converted him. Let this suffice
To shew why I my Pilgrim patronize.

It came from mine own heart, so to my head,
And thence into my fingers trickled:
Then to my pen, from whence immediately
On paper I did dribble it daintily.'—p. lxxxix."

Mr. Southey has carefully examined this charge of supposed imitation, in which so much rests upon the very simplicity of the conception of the story, and has successfully shown that the tinker of Elstow could not have profited by one or two allegories in the French and Flemish languages—works which he could have had hardly a chance to meet with; which, if thrown in his way, he could not have read; and, finally, which, if he had read them, could scarcely have supplied him with a single hint. Mr. Southey, however, has not mentioned a work in English, of Bunyan's own time, and from which, certainly, the general notion of his allegory might have been taken. The work we allude to is now before us, entitled, 'The Parable of the Pilgrim, written to a friend by Symon Patrick, D.D., Dean of Peterborough;' the same learned person, well known by his theological writings, and successively Bishop of Chichester and Ely. This worthy man's inscription is dated the 14th of December, 1672; and Mr. Southey's widest conjecture will hardly allow an earlier date for Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, 1672 being the very year in which he was enlarged from prison. The language of Dr. Patrick, in addressing his friend, excludes the possibility of his having borrowed from John Bunyan's celebrated work. He apologizes for sending to his acquaintance one in the old fashioned dress of a pilgrim; and says he found among the works of a late writer, Baker's Sancta Sophia, a short discourse, under the name of a Parable of a Pilgrim; 'which was so agreeable to the portion of fancy he was endowed with, that he presently thought that a work of this nature would be very grateful to his friends also. It appears that the Parable of a Pilgrim, so sketched by Dr. Patrick, remained for some years in the possession of the private friend for whom it was drawn up, until, it being supposed by others that the work might be of general utility, it was at length published in 1678.—Before that year the first edition of the Pilgrim's Progress had unquestionably made its appearance; but we equally acquit the Dean of Peterborough and the tinker of Elstow from copying a thought or idea from each other. If Dr. Patrick had seen the Pilgrim's Progress he would, probably, in the pride of academic learning, have scorned to adopt it as a model; but, at all events, as a man of worth, he would never have denied the obligation if he had incurred one. John Bunyan, on his part, would in all likelihood have scorned, 'with his very heels,' to borrow anything from a dean; and we are satisfied that he would have cut his hand off rather than written the introductory verses we have quoted, had not his Pilgrim been entirely his own.

Indeed, whosoever will take the trouble of comparing the two works which, turning upon nearly the same allegory, and bearing very similar titles, came into existence at or about the very same time, will plainly see their total dissimilarity. Bunyan's is a close and continued allegory, in which the metaphorical fiction is sustained with all the minuteness of a real story. In Dr. Patrick's the same plan is generally announced as arising from the earnest longing of a traveller, whom he calls Philotheus or Theophilus, whose desires are fixed on journeying to Jerusalem as a pilgrim. After much distressing uncertainty, caused by the contentions of pretended guides, who recommend different routes, he is at length recommended to a safe and intelligent one. Theophilus hastens to put himself under his pilotage, and the good man gives forth his instructions for the way, and in abundant detail, so that all the dangers of error and indifferent company may be securely avoided; but in all this, very little care is taken even to preserve the appearance of the allegory: in a word, you have, almost in plain terms, the moral and religious precepts necessary to be observed in the actual course of a moral and religious life. The pilgrim, indeed, sets out upon his journey, but it is only in order again to meet with his guide, who launches further into whole chapters of instructions, with scarcely a reply from the passive pupil. It is needless to point out the extreme difference between this strain of continued didactics, rather encumbered than enlivened by a starting metaphor, which, generally quite lost sight of, the author recollects every now and then, as if by accident—and the thoroughly life-like manner in which John Bunyan puts the adventures of his pilgrim before us. Two circumstances alone strike us as trenching somewhat on the manner of him of Elstow: the one is where the guide awakens some sluggish pilgrims, whom he finds sleeping by the way;[6 - Parable of the Pilgrim, chapter xxx.] the other is where their way is crossed by two horsemen, who insist upon assuming the office of guide. 'The one is a pleasing talker, excellent company by reason of his pleasant humour, and of a carriage very pleasant and inviting; but they observed he had a sword by his side, and a pair of pistols before him, together with another instrument hanging at his belt, which was formed for pulling out of eyes.'[7 - Ibidem, chapter xxxiv.] The pilgrims suspected this well-armed cavalier to be one of that brood who will force others into their own path, and then put out their eyes in case they should forsake it. They have not got rid of their dangerous companion, by whom the Romish church is indicated, when they are accosted by a man of a quite different shape and humour, 'more sad and melancholy, more rude, and of a heavier wit also, who crossed their way on the right-hand.' He also (representing, doubtless, the Presbyterians or Sectaries) pressed them with eagerness to accept his guidance, and did little less than menace them with total destruction if they should reject it. A dagger and a pocket-pistol, though less openly and ostentatiously disposed than the arms of the first cavalier, seem ready for the same purposes; and he, therefore, is repulsed, as well as his neighbour. These are the only passages in which the church dignitary might be thought to have caught for a moment the spirit of the tinker of Bedford. Through the rest of his parable, which fills a well-sized quarto volume, the dean no doubt evinces considerable learning, but, compared to Bunyan, may rank with the dullest of all possible doctors; 'a worthy neighbour, indeed, and a marvellous good bowler—but for Alexander, you see how 'tis.' Yet Dr. Patrick had the applause of his own time. The first edition of his Parable appeared, as has been mentioned, in 1678; and the sixth, which now lies before us, is dated 1687.[8 - The Poet Laureate may, perhaps, like to hear that Dr. Patrick introduces into his parable a very tolerable edition of that legend of the roasted fowls recalled to life by St. James of Compostella, of which he himself has recently given us so lively and amusing a metrical version.]

Mr. Southey introduces the following just eulogium on our classic of the common people:

"Bunyan was confident in his own powers of expression; he says—

—thine only way
Before them all, is to say out thy say
In thine own native language, which no man
Now useth, nor with ease dissemble can.

And he might well be confident in it. His is a homespun style, not a manufactured one; and what a difference is there between its homeliness, and the flippant vulgarity of the Roger L'Estrange and Tom Brown school! If it is not a well of English undefiled to which the poet as well as the philologist must repair, if they would drink of the living waters, it is a clear stream of current English—the vernacular speech of his age, sometimes indeed in its rusticity and coarseness, but always in its plainness and its strength. To this natural style Bunyan is in some degree beholden for his general popularity;—his language is every where level to the must ignorant reader, and to the meanest capacity: there is a homely reality about it; a nursery tale is not more intelligible, in its manner of narration, to a child. Another cause of his popularity is, that he taxes the imagination as little as the understanding. The vividness of his own, which, as his history shows, sometimes could not distinguish ideal impressions from actual ones, occasioned this. He saw the things of which he was writing as distinctly with his mind's eye as if they were indeed passing before him in a dream. And the reader perhaps sees them more satisfactorily to himself, because the outline only of the picture is presented to him; and the author having made no attempt to fill up the details, every reader supplies them according to the measure and scope of his own intellectual and imaginative powers."

Mr. Southey, observing with what general accuracy this apostle of the people writes the English language, notwithstanding all the disadvantages under which his youth must have been passed, pauses to notice one gross and repeated error. 'The vulgarism alluded to,' says the laureate, 'consists in the almost uniform use of a for have—never marked as a contraction, e.g. might a made me take heed—like to a been smothered.' Under favour, however, this is a sin against orthography rather than grammar: the tinker of Elstow only spelt according to the pronunciation of the verb to have, then common in his class; and the same form appears a hundred times in Shakspeare. We must not here omit to mention the skill with which Mr. Southey has restored much of Bunyan's masculine and idiomatic English, which had been gradually dropped out of successive impressions by careless, or unfaithful, or what is as bad, conceited correctors of the press.

The speedy popularity of the Pilgrim's Progress had the natural effect of inducing Bunyan again to indulge the vein of allegory in which his warm imagination and clear and forcible expression had procured him such success. Under this impression, he produced the second part of his Pilgrim's Progress; and well says Mr. Southey, that none but those who have acquired the ill habit of always reading critically, can feel it as a clog upon the first. The first part is, indeed, one of those delightfully simple and captivating tales which, as soon as finished, we are not unwilling to begin again. Even the adult becomes himself like the child who cannot be satisfied with the repetition of a favourite tale, but harasses the story-telling aunt or nurse, to know more of the incidents and characters. In this respect Bunyan has contrived a contrast, which, far from exhausting his subject, opens new sources of attraction, and adds to the original impression. The pilgrimage of Christiana, her friend Mercy, and her children, commands sympathy at least as powerful as that of Christian himself, and it materially adds to the interest which we have taken in the progress of the husband, to trace the effects produced by similar events in the case of women and children.

"There is a pleasure," says the learned editor, "in travelling with another companion the same ground—a pleasure of reminiscence, neither inferior in kind nor degree to that which is derived from a first impression. The characters are judiciously marked: that of Mercy, particularly, is sketched with an admirable grace and simplicity; nor do we read of any with equal interest, excepting that of Ruth in Scripture, so beautifully, on all occasions, does the Mercy of John Bunyan unfold modest humility regarding her own merits, and tender veneration for the matron Christiana."

"The distinctions between the first and second part of the Pilgrim's Progress are such as circumstances render appropriate; and as John Bunyan's strong mother wit enabled him to seize upon correctly. Christian, for example, a man, and a bold one, is represented as enduring his fatigues, trials, and combats, by his own stout courage, under the blessing of heaven: but to express that species of inspired heroism by which women are supported in the path of duty, notwithstanding the natural feebleness and timidity of their nature, Christiana and Mercy obtain from the interpreter their guide, called Great-heart, by whose strength and valour their lack of both is supplied, and the dangers and distresses of the way repelled and overcome.

"The author hints, at the end of the second part, as if 'it might be his lot to go this way again;' nor was his mind that light species of soil which could be exhausted by two crops. But he left to another and very inferior hand the task of composing a third part, containing the adventures of one Tender Conscience, far unworthy to be bound up, as it sometimes is, with John Bunyan's matchless parable."

'Tis necessary a writing critic should understand how to write. And though every writer is not bound to show himself in the capacity of critic, every writing critic is bound to show himself capable of being a writer.

Shaftesbury Criticism

Notes Of A Reader

LACONICS

(From Maxwell. By Theodore Hook.)

Professional People

None of our fellow-creatures enjoy life more than the successful member of one of the learned professions. There is, it is true, constant toil; but there are constant excitement, activity, and enthusiasm; at least, where there is not enthusiasm in a profession, success will never come—and as to the affairs of the world in general, the divine, the lawyer, and the medical man, are more conversant and mixed up with them, than any other human beings—cabinet ministers themselves, not excepted.