John Bunyan: Emblematic Writer

By E. Beatrice Batson

Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois

The imaginative power of John Bunyan as a writer of allegories has long been recognized, but that same visual imagination which is strongly evident in his emblematic works has received less attention. Although I shall focus in this study on his Dizine Emblems, I shall also show his emblematic “method” in other selected writings.

Because the history of the emblem has already been carefully studied,[1] I wish only to recall that the first published and circulated emblem book was Andrea Alciati’s Emblematum Liber, printed by Henry Steyner at Augsburg in 1530. Influential on the form the emblem took, the Emblematum Liber was also an exceedingly popular book, which according to Henry Green, went through one hundred and seventy-five editions throughout Europe and in England by 1750.[2] The first English collection of emblems[3] was Geoffrey Whitney’s, A Choice of Emblems, published in 1586. Other writers associated with emblems were Henry Peacham, George Wither, Christopher Harvey, John Hall, John Barber, Francis Quarles, and others; the significance of the emblematic habit of mind was also notable in the poetry of Spenser, Herbert, and Crashaw.

In its strictest sense, the emblem consists of a picture illustrating some moral truth followed by a scriptural citation, a poem commenting on the significance of the picture, a quotation, or quotations, from the church Fathers or other authorities, and frequently a concluding epigram. Bargali, an Italian exponent of the science of emblem writing, declared that the words and the pictures were to be “so strictly united together, that being considered apart, they cannot explicate themselves distinctly the one without the other.”[4] No doubt Bargali was primarily interested in guaranteeing that readers not overlook the ,’meaning” of the visual, but his precautions suggest the picture as an essential component of emblem writing. The emblematic habit of mind, however, has pervaded the writings of various English writers[5] as well as writings of John Bunyan which are not specifically categorized as emblems, and his Divine Emblems, formerly titled Country Rhymes for Boys and Girls, appeared in the original without pictures, plates, or woodcuts.[6] Roger Sharrock states that there is abundant evidence in Bunyan’s minor works which demonstrate an emblematic attitude and he discusses at length the use of the emblem as a literary device in The Pilgrim’s Progress, showing in particular that the Interpreter’s House is a veritable emblem theater.[7]

The implicit presence of the picture, not the picture itself, is essential in emblematic writing. The emblem belongs, as does other “literary” writing, to the kind which Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism calls an autonomous verbal structure, or writing in which the final direction of meaning resides in our perception[8] and this direction comes through symbolic “literary” language—whether simile, metaphor, personification, or other rhetorical devices. Furthermore, as D. W. Robertson, Jr. says, “the delight in the enigmatic which appears in ... musical configurations of the fourteenth century, and in the emblem books of the Renaissance is not something merely ‘quaint’ … the enigmatic figure was one of the most powerful and effective instruments by means of which the … artist could fulfill the aims of his art.”[9] The emblem and other enigmatic figures enable the writer “to appeal, first of all, to the reason, and through the reason to the affective values which philosophy and theology pointed to as the highest and most moving values possible to humanity.”[10] What we expect then is the “talking-picture” of the literary description and the “picture of signification or transformation into moral meaning.”[11]

Obviously, a strong, didactic quality is implicit in this view of the figurative expression, and it is easy to mistake the surface application for “crudity” and artistic ineptitude;[12] but our mistake in no way hampers the emblematist’s belief that configuration of known things or objects stimulates perception of an underlying truth and order.[13]

That Bunyan knew how to take “known things” and stimulate “perception of an underlying truth and order” or that he knew how to direct the reader from the concrete materials of the figures to something underneath the language or beyond the figure is at once evident from a cursory look at any of the various genres which he used; that he did both with a considerable degree of literary skill is equally true. Furthermore, in various works he refers to his theoretical belief in using concrete and known objects to lead the mind toward a perception of something invisible.

In Solomon’s Temple Spiritualized (1688), Bunyan writes: “Since it is the wisdom of God to speak to us ofttimes by trees, gold, silver, stones, beasts, fowls, fishes, spiders, ants, frogs, flies, lice, dust, etc., and here by wood; how should we by them understand his voice if we count there is no mearing in them?”[14] Similarly, Bunyan expresses in The Holy War his view that the figurative expression offers not exclusively pleasure but points toward some spiritual end. After the feast at Mansoul, for example, Emmanuel wanted to entertain the people with riddles, and in depicting the occasion, Bunyan says:

Emmanuel also expounded unto them some of those riddles himself, but oh! how they were light’ned! They saw what they never saw; they could not have thought that such rarities could have been couched in so few and ordinary words …. Yea, they did gather that the things themselves were a kind of a portraiture, and that of Emmanuel himself; for when they read in the scheme where the riddles were writ, and looked in the face of the Princes, things looked so like the one to the other, that Mansoul could not forbear but say, ‘This is the Lamb! This is the Sacrifice! This is the Rock! This is the Red-Cow! This is the Door! and this is the Way!—with a great many other things more.[15]

Bunyan’s stance is similar to what Emile Mâle asserts about the thoughtful man of the Middle Ages: “The world is a symbol, ‘an idea of God made manifest in the World.’ … the world is a great book written by the hand of God, in which every being is a word charged with meaning.”[16]

If there is evidence in the theory of his view of figurative language, so similarly do his works abound in manifestation of the emblem as a literary device.

We have already referred to Bunyan’s practice of the emblematic attitude in The Pilgrim’s Progress, especially in the “theater” of the Interpreter’s house (in Part One), and there is similar practice in other selections before the publication of the Divine Emblems. In Part One of The Pilgrim’s Progress, more specifically, Christian, as he pushes on in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, confronts new dangers: “Snares, Traps, Gins …. Nets…. Pits, Pitfalls, deep holes.” But simultaneously, Bunyan speaks of “the Sun rising,” then reiterates, “as I said, just now the Sun was rising” and then gives to Christian the words: “His candle shineth on my head, and by his light I go through darkness.” The candle, the rising Sun, the light are “the known objects” which point toward the light of Christ’s presence. In the second part of The Pilgrim’s Progress there is a “theater” of emblems both inside and outside the Interpreter’s house. The Interpreter shows Christiana and her fellow-pilgrims “what Christian, Christiana’s husband had seen sometime before,” but he also shows new emblems to the new pilgrims. For their understanding and growth, the Interpreter shows them the celebrated figure, the man with the Muck Rake, which Roger Sharrock calls “emblematic to the finger-tips” and the “most effective” of all Bunyan’s collections of emblems.[17] In an extended point by point explanation of the visual details, the Interpreter leads the mind of Christiana and her “Company” from the visible to the invisible. Note the emblem:

… the Interpreter takes them apart again: and has them first into a Room, where was a man that could look no way but downwards, with a Muckrake in his hand. There stood also one over his head with a Celestial Crown, in his Hand, and proffered to give him the Crown for the Muck-rake; but the man did neither look up, nor regard; but rakes to himself the Straws, the small Sticks, and Dust of the Floor.[18]

After Christiana sees the figure, the dialogue continues with the following interchange:

Then said Christiana, I perswade my self that I know somewhat the meaning of this: For this is a Figure of a man of this world: Is it not, good Sir? Inter. Thou has said the right, said lie, and his Muck-rake doth show his Carnal Mind. And whereas thou seest him rather give heed to rake up Straws and Sticks, and the Dust of the Floor, than to what he says that calls to him from above with the Celestial Crown in his Hand; it is to show, That Heaven is but a Fable to some, and that things here are counted the only things substantial. Now whereas it was also showed thee, that the man could look no way but downwards: It is to let thee know that earthly things when they are with Power upon Men’s minds, quite carry their hearts away from God. Chris. Then said Christiana, O! deliver me from this Muck-rake. 

Inter. That Prayer said the Interpreter, has lain by till ‘tis almost rusty: Give me NOT Riches, is scarce the Prayer of one of ten thousand. Straws, and Sticks, and Dust, with most are the great things now looked after.[19]

Not only is the tableau vivid: a man looking downward, a muckrake, straws, sticks, dust, and One above offering a celestial crown for the muckrake but the picture is an excellent portraiture of Bunyan’s emblematic writing in that the concrete objects are components of a “figure” which point toward the invisible.

But there are other emblems for Christians to view: the spider, dwelling in the “best Room” of the house; the hen and chickens, compared to “the King” and his “obedient ones”; the butcher and the sheep in the slaughter house, suggesting the patience with which one suffers; the flowers in the field, all as tile “gardiner has set them,” connoting the diversities of Christians with each in his proper place; the bad crops-telling again that fruitlessness is condemned “to the Fire”; the “little Robbin with a great Spider in his mouth”; pointing to the difference between appearance and reality; and the tree, rotten at the heart, whose “out-side is fair” but whose “inside is rotten.” No doubt these rich and varied emblems on commonplace subjects are almost special pleas from Bunyan that the distance between the visible and invisible not go unobserved; or, as Sharrock aptly states, “these emblem passages … are a reminder to the casual reader that he will only draw the full content of meaning if he is continually looking behind the story to the parable and the occult reference….”[20] Furthermore, as James F. Forrest perceptively shows (in the second part of The Pilgrim’s Progress in his discussion of Mercy’s yearning for the looking-glass), Bunyan does far more than simply give a counterpart to an incident of Part One in which the Shepherd lends Christian and Hopeful the “perspective-glass.” Not only does Bunyan adopt the scriptural use of the looking-glass as a metaphor of God’s Word and as a reflector of mental content, but also through the episode he communicates an artistic self-consciousness and acknowledges the comprehension of art as a device through which the sinner is brought face to face with the iniquity of his own mind and taught to see himself as he is.[21] In brief, the surface figure of the action and the inner landscape are always intertwined.

If the emblem pervaded The Pilgrim’s Progress, so similarly does it appear in other writings. There are, for instance, numerous “speaking pictures” in The Holy War, such as the scutcheons of the Prince’s captains, or Mansoul itself in its backslidden predicament as “an emblem of Hell” which was like a “barren wilderness,” but it is A Book for Boys and Girls, or Country Rhymes for Children, later called Divine Emblems which contains Bunyan’s concentrated effort in the emblem-writing genre.

The range of Bunyan’s subjects includes a few on the sacraments or doctrinal and theological topics; others call attention to the transience of temporal things and the brevity of life. Numerous creatures and objects which a child would easily observe in the country are those on which Bunyan based most of his “country rhymes for children”: the bee, an egg, the lark, the spider, the snail, the mole, the cackling of a hen, flint in water, the rose bush, bells, lanterns, and others. Rarely does he use abstractions for subjects, but included among these infrequent emblems are: “Of Beauty,” “Upon Time and Eternity” “Of Physick,” “Of Man by Nature,” and “Upon Death.” Absent from Bunyan’s emblems are the two images which R. J. Clements avers are the most popular among Renaissance emblematists—the laurel and the swan.[22] Conspicuously absent, too, are floral images, particularly the rose and the lily, with their specialized connotations of virginity, profane love, and mortality.[23] Not even the “obsequious marigold,” which to George Wither bore multiplied resemblances between the flower’s conduct before the sun and man and man’s conduct before God, was among Bunyan’s images.

Whatever Bunyan chose as his subject he usually adapted it to his own purposes and never wearied of explaining its significance. Temporal things are “spiritualized,” as one expects from the emblem writer, but Bunyan’s primary interest is not with an emblematic tradition but rather with “talking-pictures” of objects he knew best as means of pointing toward intangible qualities which he believed man needed most. But this is not necessarily a weakness of the Bunyan emblem, for, as Rosemary Freeman aptly states, “Bunyan’s handling of the convention is, in fact, much freer than that of his predecessors; he has not collected his material from familiar literary sources nor is he tied to a particular mode of representation. The “emblematic” quality of his images depends not upon their content but only upon their application.”[24]

His treatment of time, however, is by no means dissimilar to the handling of the subject by numerous writers. Erwin Panofsky in referring to time as a “Revealer” and as “Destroyer” states concerning the latter that “it was from the image of Time that, about the last years of the fifteenth century, the representations of Death began to borrow the hourglass.”[25] Undoubtedly, Bunyan’s classic example of Time as destroyer is his emblem, “Upon an Hour-Glass,” for “Time more, nor less” by the glass “will out be spun.” Focusing more pointedly on the destructive power of time, he concludes the emblem with this comparison:

Man’s Life, we will compare unto this Glass
The number of his Months he cannot pass;
But when he has accomplished his day,
He, like a Vapour, vanisheth away.[26] (p. 61)

But in sharp contrast are Bunyan and Whitney, for example, in their treatment of the subject, the bee. Whitney’s emblem has a woodcut depicting a hive with returning insects; the title under the picture is “Patria cuique chara.” Not only does the I’maister bee” rule mercifully and orderly but the other bees are patriotic, loyal, and diligent and “all the days the honie home doe beare.”[27] There Bunyan’s handling is far different:

“Upon the Bee”

The Bee goes out and Honey home doth bring;
And some who seek that Honey find a sting
Now would’st thou have the Honey and be free
From stinging; in the first place kill the Bee.

Comparison

This Bee an Emblem truly is of sin
Whose Sweet unto a many death hath been.
Now would’st have Sweet from sin, and yet not dye?
Do thou it in the first place mortifie (p. 11).

If he differs from other emblematists in his “moralizations” of the implied picture, Bunyan is just as likely to show variation or inconsistency within his own emblems. Whitney for example, holds to the traditional meaning of the symbolism of insects drawn toward the flame of a candle: admonition against profane love. But, in “Of the Fly at the Candle,” Bunyan states:

This Candle is an Emblem of that Light
Our Gospels gives in this our darksome Night:
The Fly a lively picture is of those
That hate and do this Gospel Light oppose (pp. 29-30).

In “Meditations upon the Candle” he varies his own symbolism further and shows, with considerable compactness, more than twenty point by point comparisons between a candle and man’s spiritual state. The arbitrary choice of image and comparison is of no consequence to Bunyan; in fact, the personal orientation is explicitly stated in his emblem, “Of the Boy and the Butter-fly”:

The Butter-fly doth represent to me,
The world’s best things at best but fading be (p. 28).

If there is diversity in the symbolic significance of the selected subjects, similarly there is variation in the emblematic structure. At times Bunyan uses dialogue as in “The Sinner and the Spider”; on other occasions he merges image and comparison as in the eight-lined piece, “Upon an Hour Glass.” But the most frequent pattern is a two-fold division: the first part contains the image or the description of the chosen subject; the second section, labelled “comparison” points the moral. Whatever the subject or the structure, Bunyan’s concern is not with investing the image with the whole meaning of the poem but rather with detailing points of resemblances which he sees between the image and its spiritual implication.

If there is diversity in the “picture of signification” and in the emblematic structure, there is still need for closer scrutiny of the ways in which Bunyan shows such variation in his range of subjects. To Bunyan the “proper subjects” are the “Boys and Girls of all Sorts and Degrees,” and the “toys” (a term he uses at least six times in the rhymed preface) and “playthings” which “their souls entangle.” For the first emblem, Bunyan turns to the Bible and writes a metrical version of the ten commandments. His fourth emblem is a metrical version of the Lord’s Prayer, the tenth is on the creed, and the fourteenth is on the two sacraments which Bunyan believed essential for the Christian—Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. As these emblems suggest, in disentangling “boys and girls” from their “toys,” Bunyan no doubt wanted their religious education to grow from a biblical * basis; but Bunyan’s theological thrust is at once evident, particularly in the closing lines of “Upon the Sacraments”:[28]

But shall they be my God? Or shall I have
Of them so foul and impious a Thought,
To think that from the Curse thev can me save?
Bread, Wine, nor Water me no ransom bought (p. 17).

The biblical story of the barren fig tree is also a dominant motif in Bunyan’s writings, and his emblems are no exception. The barren or fruitless “professor” seemed to haunt Bunyan’s mind, and he feared the results of a spiritually non-productive life. In his emblem, “Upon the Barren Fig-Tree in God’s Vineyard,” through the image of “barren” Bunyan catalogues in twenty-four lines the dangers of fruitlessness, and in each fourth line sounds the refrain: “Bear fruit, or else thy end will cursed be.” At various points in the emblem, Bunyan shows a number of theological insights, especially on his view of God: He is a God who can grieve or “recoil,” He is glorified by the fruit-bearing professors, He shows liberality and patience, He is merciful and also just.

If his emblems depict his views on God, similarly do they show his view of man. Like numerous seventeenth-century writers, Bunyan also contends that there are varieties of stations but all useful which man holds, and each person has his place in a glorious pattern of divine purpose. To show the “talking-picture” and “the picture of signification” structure, which Bunyan frequently used, as well as his view of the harmony in the variety of man’s gifts, we quote in large part from emblem forty-three, “Of Fowls Flying in the Air”:

Methinks I see a Sight most excellent,
All Sorts of Birds fly in the Firmament:
Some great, some small, all of a divers kind,
Mine Eye affecting, pleasant to my mind. …

Comparison

These Birds are Emblems of those men, that shall
Ere long possess the Heaven, their All in All.
They are each of divers shape, and kind;
To teach, we of all nations there shall find,
They are some great, some little, as we see;
To show, some great, some small, in Glory be.
Their flying diversely, as we behold;
Do shew Saints joys will there be manifold.
Some glide, some flutter, and some do,
In a mixt way of flying, glory too …. (p. 52).

Varied are man’s places of usefulness, but all life is brief as Bunyan pointedly shows in emblems like “Upon an Hour-Glass” or “Of the Going down of the Sun.” But Bunyan’s depiction of the lessons that the created world can afford to mankind comprises the majority of his emblems. Of the numerous examples in which commonplace creatures are subjects, the emblem, “The Sinner and the Spider” deserves close scrutiny.

Cast in the form of a dialogue, the work begins with a brief encounter between the two “characters,” immediately shows the sinner’s antipathy for the “filthy creature,” but develops to a reversed position in which the sinner considers himself “a Fool” and calls the spider his “Monitor.”

Following the sinner’s high claim that he is a man and “in God’s image made,” the Spider replies with an admission of man’s greatness as a Creature far above a spider, but then retorts:

But tho thy God hath made thee such a Creature,
Thou hast against him often play’d the traitor.

…

Thy soul, thy Reason, yea thy spotless State,
Sin has subjected to the most dreadful fate.
But I have retained my primitive condition,
I’ve all, but what I lost by thy Ambition (p. 19).

Like Henry Vaughan, who sees birds, bees, and flowers ever cleaving to God’s “divine appointments” but also sees man as the one who “drew the curse upon the world, and cracked / The whole frame with his fall,”[29] Bunyan shows too that it is man, not the creatures, who has departed from his originally appointed place and lost his “primitive condition.”

And Bunyan emphasizes further the extent of man’s sin through the spirited comments of the Spider:

Hark then; tho man is noble by creation,
He’s lapsed now to such Degeneration;
Is so besotted, and so careless grown,
As not to grieve, though he has overthrown
Himself, and brought to Bondage every thing
Created, from the Spider to the King.
Tread not upon me, neither from one go;
‘Tis man which has brought all the world to No (pp. 20-21).

But regardless of the “venomous” and “ugly” nature of the Spider, there is an arcane mystery about him of such import that man can study the “riddle” of the spider and know his own destiny, for says the Spider:

Thus in my Ways, God Wisdom doth conceal;
And by my Ways, that Wisdom doth reveal (p. 23).

By building its web in dark places, the Spider shows how “many sin with brazen faces, by building in high places” it shows that some “professing” men must die, and by entangling the flies in its web, the spider reveals the multiple, ensnaring techniques of the devil to keep man from salvation; on the other hand, the unabashed persistence of this character by which it “can possess / The Palace of a King,” may equally be a paradigm for man in his pursuit of heaven. The Spider declares to the sinner both its nature and its meaning:

I seize a Palace, do with hands take hold
Of Doors, of locks, or bolts; yea I am bold …
Yea, if I please I do the highest Stories
Ascend, there fit, and so behold the Glories
My self is compos’t with, as if I were
One of the chiefest Courtiers that be there.
Here Lords and Ladies do come round about me,
With grave Demeanor: Nor do any flout me,
For this my brave Adventure, no not they;
They come, they go, but leave me there to stay.
Now, my Reproacher, I do by all this
Shew how thou may’st possess thy self of Bliss.
Thou art worse than a Spider, but take hold
On Christ the Door, thou shalt not be controul’d
By Him do thou the Heavenly Palace enter,
None chide thee will for this thy brave Adventure.

By contrasting man’s original state with his fallen condition, by contrasting man with an inferior creature, and by establishing an analogy between the ways of an inferior creature with the predicament of human experience, Bunyan has created, through his spirited dialogue, an emblem from a commonplace image, which had a special appeal for Bunyan throughout his works.

Because of Bunyan’s love for music and because he lived in an age which emphasized the harmonious power of this important field, we might expect his turning frequently to music for his images. Rarely does Bunyan seem to think of the “cosmological music” and when he speaks of the subject at all, he shows no interest in the “cosmic dance.”[30] In Emblem twenty-nine, for example, he suggests the captivating power of well-rung bells and in Emblem fifty-nine, “Upon a Skillful Player on an Instrument,” the image is that of the “player” who plays so skillfully that not only is the sound appealing to the ear but the mind can be stirred and the spirit moved. But when he comes to the “Comparison,” he follows his usual pattern and imposes his own meaning upon the image and views it as an emblem of the “Gospel—Minister” who skillfully handles every word, whether he preaches of wrath or of grace.

If Bunyan turned infrequently to music for emblems., he almost as rarely used abstract subjects (as noted earlier). Without exception these are versified assertions pointing up simple distinctions or simple explanations on the meaning of the subject. “Upon Time and Eternity,” for example, he attempts in four brief lines to clarify the difference between the two enormous abstractions:

Eternity is like unto a Ring
Time, like to measure, doth it self extend;
Measure commences, is a finite thing,
The Ring has no beginning, middle, end (p. 75).

But Bunyan’s primary concern in his various emblems, as in all of his writings, is to direct one’s focus from the visible to the invisible and from the limited significance of physical objects to the larger significance of those objects as symbolic of a Reality not limited by time and space.[31]

He was able to present the mind with an image and a succession of analogies, direct the mind toward similitudes based on corporal things, and thence refer to those spiritual truths contained in the similitudes.[32] That some of his rhymes show poetic naivet6 no one could deny; that most suggest a sponaneity and vigor is equally true. To Bunyan the emblem was yet another literary device through which he might attack the accusation the “Metaphors make us blind” and to declare of the wise, discerning individual:

… he rather stoops,
And seeks to find out what by pins and loops,
By Calves, and Sheep; by Heifers, and by Rams;
By Birds and Herbs, and by the blood of Lambs;
God speaketh to him: And happy is he
That finds the light, and grace that in them be.[33]

Notes

1. Two studies of exceptional merit are Roger Sharrock, “Bunyan and the English Writers,” The Review of English Studies (XXI, No. 82), 1945, and Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books (London: Chatto and Windus, 1945). Sharrock’s study focuses on the emblem as a literary device in The Pilgrim’s Progress, while Rosemary Freeman, whose work embraces the English emblematic tradition, includes a discussion of the Divine Emblems as well as a study of the emblematic device in various works of Bunyan. An older work which also contains helpful insights on the earliest emblem writer is Henry Green, Andrea Alciati and His Books of Emblems, (London: Trubner and Company, 1872). Mario Praz, Studies in Seventeenth Century Imagery, II (London: The Warburg Institute, 1947) is devoted to a bibliography of emblem books.
2. Green, pp. 113, 116, 274.
3. Van der Noot’s A Theatre for Worldlings, has been described on occasion as the first emblem book printed in English. In 1569 Henry Bynneman brought out an English version of the work, originally written in Flemish.
4. Quoted in Henry Estienne, The Art of Making Devices. Translated by Thomas Blount, London, 1646, p. 10.
5. See Freeman, pp. 9-36, 99-113.
6. The ninth edition of 1724 contained woodcuts for the first time.
7. “Bunyan and the English Emblem Writers,” p. 197.
8. Frye, p. 74.
9. A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 63.
10. Ibid.
11. Mario Praz, Studies in Seventeenth Century Imagery, I (London: The Warburg Institute, 1939), pp. 156-7.
12. A Preface to Chaucer, p. 63.
13. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), is exceptionally helpful in showing how configuration of known things or objects stimulates insight into and understanding of an underlying order. (See especially pp. 3-16.) See also Bernard F. Huppe, Doctrine and Poetry (New York: State University of New York, 1959).
14. Stebbing, Vol. 3, p. 221.
15. The Holy War, pp. 132–3.
16. Religious Art (New York: Farrar, Straus & Company, Noonday Book, 1968), p. 64.
17. “Bunyan and the English Emblem Writers,” p. 112.
18. The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 199, ed. James Blanton Wharey, rev. Roger Sharrock (Oxford, 1960).
19. The Pilgrim’s Progress, pp. 199-200.
20. “Bunyan and the English Emblem Writers,” p. 116.
21. See “Mercy with Her Mirror,” Philological Quarterly, XLII (January, 1963), pp. 121-6.
22. “The Cult of the Poet in Renaissance Emblem Literature,” PMLA, LIX (September, 1944), pp. 681-683.
23. See Praz, Seventeenth Century Imagery, I, pp. 103–104, 112–113, and 117–119 for discussion of various emblematists’ use of specialized association of rose and lily.
24. English Emblem Books, pp. 82-3.
25. See Studies in Iconology, pp. 82-3.
26. Quotations are from A Book for Boys and Girls, a facsimile of the unique first edition, published in 1686 (London: Elliot Stock, 62 Paternoster Row, 1890).
27. Henry Green, ed. Whitney’s ‘Choice of Emblemes’ (London: Lovell Reeve and Company, 1866), p. 200.
28. Richard Greaves, John Bunyan (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1969), pp. 137-145, discusses Bunyan’s concept of the sacraments as belonging to the Zwinglian tradition.
29. See particularly Vaughan’s two poems, “Man” and “Corruption.”
30. E. M. W. Tillyard titles the final chapter of The Elizabethan World Picture (New York: Random House) “The Cosmic Dance” in which he shows in a few pages the idea of creation as “a harmony of sounds.”
31. J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1966), a work devoted to Defoe has provocative insights on the emblematic nature of Puritan literature and of Bunyan, See especially pp. 114-15, 117, 122–23, 133, 189.
32. See discussion of aesthetic principle under consideration in A Preface to Chaucer, p. 56.
33. James Blanton Wharey (ed). The Pilgrim’s Progress, revised by Roger Sharrock (Oxford: at the Clarendon Press, 1960), p. 4,