?The first book which attracted my particular notice was "The Pilgrim?s Progress", with rude woodcuts; it excited my curiosity in an extraordinary degree. There was "Christian knocking at the strait gate", his "fight wit Appolyn", his "passing near the lions", his "escape from Giant Dispair [sic]", his perils at "Vanity Fair", his arrival in "the land of Beula", and his final passage to "Eternal Rest": all these were matters for the exercise of my feeling and my imagination. And then when it was explained to me ? as it was by my mother and sister...?