Mr. Johnson confessed that the work of Cervantes was the greatest in the world, speaking of it I mean as a book of entertainment; and when we consider that every other author's admirers are confined to his countrymen, and perhaps to the literary classes among them, while Don Quixote is a sort of common property, an universal classic, equally tasted by the court and the cottage, equally applauded in France and England as in Spain, quoted by every servant, the amusement of every age from infancy to decrepitude; the first book you see on every shelf, in every shop, where books are sold, through all the states of Italy; who can refuse his consent to an avowal of the
in leather.' Letters of Mrs. Montagu, iv. 78. 1759. Burke. 'The admirer of Don Bellianis perhaps does not understand the refined language of the Eneid, who, if it was degraded into the style of the Pilgrims Progress, might feel it in all its energy on the same principle which made him an admirer of Don Bellianis.' On the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. 1759, p. 25. 1765. Gentleman's Magazine, p. 1 68. 'The Pilgrim's Progress is certainly a work of original and uncommon genius.' 1776. Beattie. 'Certain it is that fables in which there is neither love nor gallantry may be made highly interesting even to the fancy and affections of a modern reader. This appears not only from the writings of Shakespeare and other great authors, but from the Pilgrims Progress of Bunyan, and the History of Robinson Crusoe.' Essays on Poetry and Music, ed. 1779, p. 191. 1782. Horace Walpole. 'Dante was extravagant, absurd, disgusting, in short a Methodist Parson in Bedlam. Ariosto was a more agreeable Amadis de Gaul, and Spenser, John Bunyan in rhyme.' Walpole's Letters, viii. 235. 1785. Cowper:— 'I name thee not, lest so despised a name Should move a sneer at thy deserved fame, Yet ev'n in transitory life's late day That mingles all my brown with sober grey, Revere the man whose Pilgrim marks the road And guides the Progress of the soul to God.' Tirocinium. Poems, 1786, ii, 298. Macaulay, in 1830, wrote: '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,' &c. Essays, ed. 1843, i. 424. Not six years after Macaulay wrote this, the Pilgrim's Progress was described in the Penny Cyclopaedia, vi. 20, as a 'coarse allegory . . . mean, jejune and wearisome.'
superiority
