Pilgrim's Progress
, has, in a manner worthy of his head and heart, reduced this oft repeated charge to its proper value. Bunyan was never, in our received sense of the word, wicked. He was chaste, sober, honest; but he was a bitter blackguard; that is, damned his own and his neighbour's eyes on slight or no occasion, and was fond of a row. In this our excellent Laureate has performed an important service to morality. For the transmutation of actual reprobates into saints is doubtless possible; but like the many recorded facts of corporeal alchemy, it is not supported by modern experiments.
[Pilgrim's Progress]
Part i. p. II.
As I walked through the wilderness of this world.
That in the Apocalypse the wilderness is the symbol of the world, or rather of the worldly life, Bunyan discovered by the instinct of a similar genius. The whole Jewish history, indeed, in all its details is so admirably adapted to, and suggestive of, symbolical use, as to justify the belief that the spiritual application, the interior and permanent sense, was in the original intention of the inspiring Spirit, though it might not have been present, as an object of distinct consciousness, to the inspired writers.
Ib.
... where was a den.