"I would gladly give up all my learning if I could preach like that tinker."

In all this fame, however, Bunyan preserved his humility. He refused to be more than a visitor to London, and from his release to his death lived in a simple cottage in the parish of St. Cuthbert's, Bedford. A. M. Bagford, curious to see the study of so great a man, one day visited the tinker. To his surprise he found a small room, the contents of which, says Canon Venables, one of Bunyan's best biographers, were "hardly larger than those of his prison cell. They were limited to a Bible, and copies of The Pilgrim's Progress and a few other books chiefly his own works."

There is little to add to Bunyan's story except the incident which hastened his death. He often left Bedford to preach in neighboring towns, to comfort the afflicted, and to settle foolish disputes. In the summer of 1688 he rode to Reading for the purpose of mending a quarrel between a father and a son. He was successful, but in the subsequent ride through a driving rain to London, where he was to preach the next Sunday, caught a severe cold. He managed to preach on the Sunday, August 19, but on the following Tuesday he fell seriously sick and a few days later, August 31, he died. He was buried in Bunhill Fields cemetery.

In spite of rather meagre facts, the figure of the great Puritan preacher stands out very clear. There are one or two striking descriptions of him. Charles Doe says, "He was tall of stature, strong-boned, though not corpulent; somewhat of a ruddy face, with sparkling eyes, wearing his hair on his upper lip after the old British fashion. His hair reddish, but in his later days time had sprinkled it with grey. His nose well

set, but not declining or bending. His mouth moderately large, his forehead something high, and his habit always plain and modest." A more vigilant, active man, one would say, than the well-fed laborer so often depicted on the frontispiece of his books. Canon Venables adds the testimony of John Nelson, who knew Bunyan in prison: "His countenance was grave and sedate, and did so to the life discover the inward frame of his heart, that it was convincing to the beholders and did strike something of awe into them that had nothing of the fear of God." As regards Bunyan's creed, we have his own words: "I would be, as I hope I am, a Christian. But for those factious titles of Anabaptist, Independent, Presbyterian, and the like, I conclude that they come neither from Jerusalem nor from Antioch, but from Hell or from Babylon."

The one important point of Bunyan's life, after all, is his conversion and its results; above all, the chief result, Pilgrim's Progress. How he went up into the pulpit at a time when people strained by day and by night to hear the story of the Bible; how he, fresh from his tinker's trade and speaking the simple, homely English of the great Book, stirred their hearts; how true to the eager listeners the story of the Carpenter's Son of Nazareth sounded from his lips,-of this we to-day get only a faint impression. Bunyan the preacher may indeed be forgotten, but Bunyan the author of Pilgrim's Progress has taken a permanent place in history. In the tinker's book is revealed the best type of Puritan, -the man too big to be lost in the unessential disputes of sects, the man whose single, absorbing interest was the salvation of the soul. Cromwell and Milton were the only other Puritans who combined his intensity of re

ligious zeal with his breadth of mind and power over men. The lives of these three, warrior, poet, and preacher, best explain why Puritanism set such an indelible stamp on the English nation.

JOHN DRYDEN

JOHN DRYDEN has been called a lock, by which the waters of English poetry were let down from the mountains of Shakespeare and Milton to the plain of Pope. By his admirers and followers he was regarded as the man who redeemed our poetry from its wildness and barbarism and taught it to be elegant and refined. By general consent he is now considered a master of smooth and energetic verse, the best satirist and one of the most judicious critics in the history of our literature. He was among the first to write that easy and vigorous prose which was almost unknown in the time of our great poetry. More than this, he was a kind of literary dictator in his day, though his rule was not without frequent dispute; too often, however, he is found ministering to the degraded taste of his contemporaries when he ought to have been maintaining the best traditions of a literature which he comprehended and valued so well. He cannot be absolved from the charge of pandering to the vices of the Restoration period. Maturing slowly, for he was doing his best work at the end of his life upon the verge of threescore and ten, Dryden was just ready for his poetic task with the accession of Charles II in 1660. (At once he became the favored dramatist of the court, and the representative poet for these new times.)

What these times were must be briefly recorded by way of explanation of the poet's career. To Milton and his friends of the lost cause it seemed that the "sons of Belial, flown with insolence and wine," were in full con

trol of the situation. To the restored cavaliers it merely seemed that sour rebellion was at last put down, Astræa had returned, and the King was come to his own. Extreme repression had quite naturally yielded to recklessness just as extreme. Where in Puritan times men were constrained to assume a virtue they did not begin to feel, and where many a man went about as a kind of compulsory Roundhead, so here in the reaction against that excess of piety Englishmen exaggerated their own profession of license and even vice, and many a man was constrained to pretend the immorality which at heart he really loathed. (Hypocrisy now became the cardinal sin, and to be self-contained, orderly, and moral seemed to the world clear evidence of double dealing.) Hence a general spirit of indulgence and freedom from moral restraint, with the Merry Monarch setting a brave example to his people.

To the call of this new spirit in English life Dryden responded only too well. Vigorous, earnest, and, while no Puritan, a naturally clean-minded man, he nevertheless produced comedies so indecent that even the boundless license of his public was overstepped And after its third night the worst of them had to be called in, condemned for grossness which even now, considerably reduced in print, offends the most indulgent reader.) Yet this is not the only instance when Dryden seems to float passive upon the current of his time; nor was immorality the only method by which he did violence to his literary conscience. He had, for his generation, a profound knowledge of older English literature, and reverence for its best traditions. He was, moreover, among the fit audience, though few, who understood the greatness of Paradise Lost. "This man," he is reported