Some years later, when the time arrived for the people to send a new burgher to the capital to represent them, men came from the city to ask the fruit-gatherers which of their employers should be the choice for the office. Then the chief of the workmen spoke out, "The elder will fling you a coin and a curse. The younger will give you laws and improvements for your city. He will teach you to earn the coin for yourself."
The next year the giver of charity went to the great council in Berlin, while the giver of alms superintended the vine-growing and envied his brother's good fortune.
The word allegory is used widely to signify any figurative and symbolic writing (proverb, parable, metaphor, simile, or allegory proper); but we are going to use it in its distinctive and academic sense as a rhetorical and narrative type.
Like the fable and the parable, the allegory teaches a lesson; like them it is a story, but longer than either, more detailed than either. Connected with the actors in it are generally abstract ideas used figuratively, directly personified as people on adventures or used to form the atmosphere, the goal of attainment, the place of destination, the road over which the hero travels. For instance, Youth sets out from the House of Innocence over the Road of Life and strays into the Path of Temptation that leads through the Wood of Error. Here he meets Falsehood and Shame, and overcomes them, for the time at least, and passes through the clearing of Experience toward the Castle of Perseverance, grim and dark and uninviting, that stands hard by, yet beyond, the House of Mirth, etc., etc.
When you write an allegory, you will not be so trite as this illustrative example, but will get a good idea, a good spiritual lesson, and will teach it with a unique and original plot in which the adventures themselves are interesting. The world's greatest prose allegory, "Pilgrim's Progress," has always been read for the story. The "Faerie Queene" as a metrical romance and a triple allegory of religion, Elizabeth's court, and the perfect man, has been a storehouse for prose narrators as well as for poets for three hundred years. Practically all the old morality plays were allegories. "Everyman," the best extant, is very vital indeed when put on the stage.