The Life of John Bunyan

"All who have undertaken to take an estimate of Bunyan's literary genius call special attention to the richness of his imaginative power. Few writers indeed have possessed this power in so high a degree. In nothing, perhaps, is its vividness more displayed than in the reality of its impersonations. The dramatis persons are not shadowy abstractions, moving far above us in a mystical world, or lay figures ticketed with certain names, but solid men and women of our own flesh and blood, living in our own everyday world, and of like passions with ourselves. Many of them we know familiarly; there is hardly one we should be surprised to meet any day. This lifelike power of characterization belongs in the highest degree to 'The Pilgrim's Progress.' It is hardly inferior in "The Holy War," though with some exceptions the people of 'Mansoul' have failed to engrave themselves on the popular memory as the characters of the earlier allegory have done. The secret of this graphic power, which gives 'The Pilgrim's Progress' its universal popularity, is that Bunyan describes men and women of his own day, such as he had known and seen them. They are not fancy pictures, but literal portraits." -Edmund Venables, M.A. "The book is destined, one may believe, to take rank with the classic biographies of our literature: with the 'Wesley' of Southey, with the 'George Herbert' and 'Donne' of Izaak Walton. Certainly the biographer was fortunate in his subject, one of the most picturesque, pathetic figures in our history; and in Elstow, as the scene of Bunyan's early life, he is scarcely less happy, the place being but little altered from what it was when Bunyan was a youth....There is the green where the boy played tipcat and heard the secret voice calling him away from sin; there the church tower where he stole a 'fearful joy' now and again, in seeing and joining with the ringers....No more charmingly written memoir has appeared amongst the 'Great Writers' that Mr. W. Scott is publishing, than the biography now added to the series by the pen of Canon Venables." -Bookseller "A very readable biography." -Sunday School Times