caused his death. The father of a young man in whom he took an interest,
had resolved, on some offence, real or supposed, to disinherit his son.
The young man sought Bunyan's mediation. Anxious to heal the breach,
Bunyan mounted his horse and took the long journey to the father's house
at Reading--the scene, as we have noticed, of his occasional
ministrations--where he pleaded the offender's cause so effectually as to
obtain a promise of forgiveness. Bunyan returned homewards through
London, where he was appointed to preach at Mr. Gamman's meeting-house
near Whitechapel. His forty miles' ride to London was through heavy
driving rain. He was weary and drenched to the skin when he reached the
house of his "very loving friend," John Strudwick, grocer and chandler,
at the sign of the Star, Holborn Bridge, at the foot of Snow Hill, and
deacon of the Nonconformist meeting in Red Cross Street. A few months
before Bunyan had suffered from the sweating sickness. The exposure
caused a return of the malady, and though well enough to fulfil his
pulpit engagement on Sunday, the 19th of August, on the following Tuesday
dangerous symptoms declared themselves, and in ten days the disease
proved fatal. He died within two months of completing his sixtieth year,
on the 31st of August, 1688, just a month before the publication of the
Declaration of the Prince of Orange opened a new era of civil and
religious liberty, and between two and three months before the Prince's
landing in Torbay. He was buried in Mr. Strudwick's newly-purchased
vault, in what Southey has termed the Campo Santo of Nonconformists, the
burial-ground in Finsbury, taking its name of Bunhill or Bonehill Field,
from a vast mass of human remains removed to it from the charnel house of
St. Paul's Cathedral in 1549. At a later period it served as a place of
interment for those who died in the Great Plague of 1665. The day after
Bunyan's funeral, his powerful friend, Sir John Shorter, the Lord Mayor,
had a fatal fall from his horse in Smithfield, and "followed him across
the river."