10
My Dear Antony,
In these letters I am never going to quote to you anything that does not seem to me to rise to a level of merit well above ordinary proper prose. There are many writers whose general correctness and excellence is not to be questioned or denied whom I shall not select in these letters for your particular admiration.
By and by, when your own love of literature impels you to excursions in all directions, you may perhaps come to differ from my judgment, for everyone's taste must vary a little from that of others.
English prose in its excellence follows the proportions manifested by the contours of the elevation of the world's land.
Vast tracts lie very near the sea-level, of such are the interminable outpourings of newspapers and novels and school books. And, as each ascent from the sea-level is reached, less and less land attains to it, and when the snow-line is approached only a very small proportion indeed of the land aspires so high.
So among writers, those who climb to the snow-line are a slender band compared to all the inhabitants of the lower slopes and plains.
In these letters I do not intend to mistake a pedlar for a mountaineer, nor a hearthstone for a granite peak. Time slowly buries deep in oblivion the writings of the industrious and the dull.
Born fifteen years later than Jeremy Taylor, of whom I wrote in a former letter, John Bunyan in 1660, being a Baptist, suffered the persecution then the lot of all dissenters, and was cast into Bedford gaol, where he lay for conscience' sake for twelve years. "As I walked through the wilderness of this world," said he, "I lighted on a certain place where was a den, and laid me down in that place to sleep; and as I slept I dreamed a dream"; and the dream which he dreamed has passed into all lands, and has been translated into all languages, and has taken its place with the Bible and with the Imitation of Christ as a guide of life.
The force of simplicity finds here its most complete expression; the story wells from the man's heart, whence come all great things:—