The most well-known allegory ever written, The Pilgrim's Progress, is the journey of Christian, simultaneously filled with vivid and full human portraits of its characters. With over 100,000 copies sold in Bunyan’s lifetime, this “most perfect and complex of fairy tales” succeeded in attracting audiences from every Christian sect.

Through short biographies of John Donne and George Herbert by their fellow divine and fishing companion, Izaak Walton seeks to evoke not so much the facts of lives as their personality and virtuous character.