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The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 532, February 4, 1832 by Various
page 40 of 45 (88%)
themselves through the veil, and appear before us in their native aspect.
The effect is not unlike that which is said to have been produced on the
ancient stage, when the eyes of the actor were seen flaming through his
mask, and giving life and expression to what would else have been an
inanimate and uninteresting disguise.

The style of Bunyan is delightful to every reader, and invaluable as a
study to every person who wishes to obtain a wide command over the English
language. The vocabulary is the vocabulary of the common people. There is
not an expression, if we except a few technical terms of theology, which
would puzzle the rudest peasant. We have observed several pages which do
not contain a single word of more than two syllables. Yet no writer has
said more exactly what he meant to say. For magnificence, for pathos, for
vehement exhortation, for subtle disquisition, for every purpose of the
poet, the orator, and the divine, this homely dialect--the dialect of
plain working men--was perfectly sufficient. There is no book in our
literature on which we would so readily stake the fame of the old
unpolluted English language--no book which shows so well how rich that
language is in its own proper wealth, and how little it has been improved
by all that it has borrowed.

Cowper said, forty or fifty years ago, that he dared not name John Bunyan
in his verse, for fear of moving a sneer. To our refined forefathers, we
suppose, Lord Roscommon's Essay on Translated Verse, and the Duke of
Buckinghamshire's Essay on Poetry, appeared to be compositions infinitely
superior to the allegory of the preaching tinker. We live in better times;
and we are not afraid to say, that, though there were many clever men in
England during the latter half of the seventeenth century, there were only
two great creative minds. One of those minds produced the Paradise Lost,
the other the Pilgrim's Progress.--_Edinburgh Review_.
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