CHAPTER II--THE CITY OF MANSOUL AND ITS CINQUE PORTS.
'-- a besieged city.'-- _Isaiah_.
Our greatest historians have been wont to leave their books behind them and to make long journeys in order to see with their own eyes the ruined sites of ancient cities and the famous fields where the great battles of the world were lost and won.

We all remember how Macaulay made a long winter journey to see the Pass of Killiecrankie before he sat down to write upon it; and Carlyle's magnificent battle-pieces are not all imagination; even that wonderful writer had to see Frederick's battlefields with his own eyes before he could trust himself to describe them.

And he tells us himself how Cromwell's splendid generalship all came up before him as he looked down on the town of Dunbar and out upon the ever-memorable country round about it.

John Bunyan was not a great historian; he was only a common soldier in the great Civil War of the seventeenth century; but what would we not give for a description from his vivid pen of the famous fields and the great sieges in which he took part?
What a find John Bunyan's 'Journals' and 'Letters Home from the Seat of War' would be to our historians and to their readers! But, alas! such journals and letters do not exist.

Bunyan's complete silence in all his books about the battles and the sieges he took his part in is very remarkable, and his silence is full of significance.