Speaking in parables his slighted word;
I name thee not, lest so despis’d 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 gray,
Revere the man, whose Pilgrim marks the road,
And guides the Progress of the soul to God.”
Cowper’s Tirocinium.
The celebrated Benjamin Franklin too, in the account of his Life written by himself, informs us, that the Pilgrim’s Progress (which Franklin there, inadvertently, calls “Bunyan’s Voyages,”) was a favourite book of his, in his earlier years. “I have since learned,” says the Doctor, “that it has been translated into almost all the languages of Europe; and, next to the Bible, I am persuaded, it is one of the books which has had the greatest spread.”
[103]. This was about the year 1764.