WAR AIMS AND PEACE TALK. [To THE EDITOR or THE
" SPECTLTOR."3 country friend sends me the following MS. addition from an old family copy of The Pilgrim's Progress:—
" Now while Christian was thus shrewdly beset with Aponyon'.1 fiery darts, there were others in little better case. For young Mr. Break-their-chains, who had fought some little time as a valiant pilgrim, being newly escaped from the prison of the giant Hate- light (he is a kind of cousin of Giant Pope, though no love lost betwixt them, and like him hath taken up with much of the dead Pagan's trumpery), had fallen in with Beelzebub, Apollyon's partner for the talking part, who had filled his brain with maggots so that he saw things all awry, and was puffed up to think that with soft words he would convert Beelzebub into an angel of light : and so he was held in vain discourse, losing all his vantage. Then one Mr. Soft-pate, an unarmed pilgrim who followed the fighting men at a safe remove, boasting all the while that he abhorred their weapons of war, called out to Christian and fell to question- ing him of his purpose in fighting with Apollyon. Christian spared no breath to answer him, but laid on all the more stoutly with his right Jerusalem blade while Mr. Greatheart was coming with his beet speed from the west. Some say that when Mr. Soft- pate accosted Mr. Greatheart with his catechism of war aims, he learnt the taste of a crabtree cudgel."
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