persecution. The Act of Conformity made no distinction between aggressive and unaggressive sects such as the Baptists; and the magistrates at Bedford were compelled, however reluctantly, to arrest and imprison Bunyan as an unlicensed preacher. There seems to have been no kind of animus against him, and he could have got out of prison at any time by giving an undertaking not to preach in public. But this stipulation he found it out of his power to make, and the result was that he remained on in the county gaol from 1660 to 1672. Bunyan's detention for such a long period was evidently of an irregular kind. Such irregularities were common enough before the passing of the Habeas Corpus Act in 1679. It is probable that he was treated on the whole in a very lenient manner. In the first year of his imprisonment he is known to have made. a visit to London. He was allowed to receive the visits of his friends, to receive comforts from without, and to exhort his fellow-sufferers in the gaol, where he helped to support himself by making tag-laces. His four young children were looked after by the devoted woman whom he had married in 1659, within a year of the great loss sustained by the death of the wife of his youth. There is little doubt that the confinement of gaol considerably stimulated his powers of composition; his library there was select, consisting of the Bible and The Book of Martyrs. The first of his prison books, as they are called, was a verse dialogue called Profitable Meditations, printed in 1661; The Holy City, an expansion of a prison sermon, followed in 1665; and his famous autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, or A Brief and Faithful Relation of the Exceeding Mercy of God in Christ to his Poor Servant John Bunyan, in eight sheets, 12mo, 1666. In the early summer of 1627 his release was procured under the Act of Indulgence, and he began preaching regularly in a barn in an orchard which stood between Castle and Mill Lane.

But in 1675 his licence as a preacher was revoked, and Bunyan, once more informed against, was sent this time to the town prison or "den" on Bedford Bridge, which had recently been repaired after the damage sustained by the floods in 1671, and which was finally taken down in 1765. Here he wrote the first part of Pilgrim's Progress down to the parting of Christian and Hopeful with the shepherds on the Delectable Mountains, which Bunyan concludes with the words, "So I awoke from my dream." Bunyan was forty-seven at the time. He was writing, as usual, strictly to improve the occasion, and fell into the allegory unawares. His final imprisonment seems to have lasted only until the early months of 1676, and in 1677 Bunyan took the completed allegory (which had ended by wholly devouring the discourse) to London for publication, and it was published at 1s. 6d. in March, 1678. Some characteristic additions were made in the second edition of 1679, in which Mr. Worldly Wiseman appeared for the first time. The second part did not appear until January, 1685. The realistic Life and Death of Mr. Badman was presented to the world in 1680 in the form of a dialogue between Mr. Wiseman and Mr. Attentive, after the manner of Dent's Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven. It is the story of a predestinate rascal with a moral intention at least as clear as that in Hogarth's "Idle Apprentice," but its general plausibility is much stronger, and it has much of the realistic power of Defoe.

The next two years were occupied by Bunyan in writing his second great allegory, The Holy War, which was published in 1682. The story of his remaining years is briefly told. He lived at a small house in St. Cuthbert's parish, Bedford, in easy circumstances, greatly respected by all the Dissenters of the neighbourhood. His fame as a preacher and as author of The Pilgrim's Progress spread abroad. Annually he visited London to preach to the Baptist

churches in Pinner's Hall. It was on one of his visits to London, while staying at the house of John Strudwick on Snow Hill, that he was seized with a fever, and died on Friday, August 31st, 1688. On the following Monday he was buried in Strudwick's vault in Bunhill Fields, where a monument was placed over his tomb in 1861.

In the tribe of literature to which it belongs-that of the allegory or drawn-out fable-Pilgrim's Progress stands first. It has no rival either in success or popularity: witness the eighty translations which it has undergone in the various languages and dialects of the human speech. Satire in the guise of travel, inculcation of moral truth in allegorical form, had been attempted frequently in the world of letters from Lucian to Spenser; but such models had no existence as far as John Bunyan was concerned. The Bible was to him not only his book; it was his library as much as was the Koran to the most bigoted of Mohamme dans.

What distinguishes The Pilgrim's Progress from all other allegories is the fact that the outward story and the inward experience which it portrays are absolutely one. The child can read it with delight for the story alone, the mature reader can cross the line as often as he likes between the fable and the moral. The application is so direct that he can never be at a loss as to the bearing of an incident; at every turn he can recognise familiar footprints. The carnal man and the Christian believer are equally fascinated by the dogged valour of the Puritan sergeant, a reminiscence, it may be, of 1645.

There is no subtlety, no ambiguity about the moral, the clearness and directness of which are as unmistakable as that of the narrative in Robinson Crusoe. From this unity and perspicuity in Bunyan's work comes the unique result that he made the abstract as palatable as the concrete. The mould of style into which the allegory is thrown is one as

durable as that of our English Bible, and one even more impervious to time, for after the lapse of two hundred years there are practically no obsolete words in Bunyan. The characters in that company of his, so like and so unlike Chaucer's, were evidently drawn from life,―eternal figures in the human comedy. His Progress is a perfect reflection of the Scripture with none of the rubbish of the theologians mixed up with it.

CHAPTER VIII

ENGLAND'S SECOND POET: "SHAKESPEARE FIRST, AND NEXT-MILTON

"This man cuts us all out and the ancients too."-Dryden. "The natural expression of a soul exquisitely nourished upon the best thoughts and finest words of all ages. An appreciation of Milton is the last reward of consummated scholarship."-MARK PATTISON.

"I had thought of the Lycidas as of a full-grown beautyas springing up with all its parts absolute-till, in an evil hour, I was shown the original copy of it, together with the other minor poems of the author in the library of Trinity, kept like some treasure to be proud of. I wish they had thrown them in the Cam, or sent them after the later cantos of Spenser into the Irish Channel. How it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore! interlined, corrected! as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure! As if they might have been otherwise and just as good! As if inspiration were made up of parts, and these fluctuating, successive, indifferent! I will never go into the workshop of any great artist again."-CHARLES LAMB.

Early life-Italian travel-Pedagogy and prose-RetirementChalfont-Completion of Paradise Lost-Last Years-Crit

ical estimate-Bibliography.

JOHN MILTON was born over his father's shop in Bread Street, London, on December 9th, 1608. His father, a scrivener, a native of Halton in Oxfordshire, about one year older than Shakespeare, prospered rapidly in London from 1603 onwards at the sign of the Spread Eagle in Bread Street. He married about 1600 and had six children, three of whom, a daughter Anne and two sons, John and Christopher, survived infancy. Anne married Edward Phillips and became the mother of Edward and John