bridge which, previously to 1765, spanned the Ouse at Bedford, and as Mr.
Froude has said, has "furnished a subject for pictures," both of pen and
pencil, "which if correct would be extremely affecting." Unfortunately,
however, for the lovers of the sensational, these pictures are not
"correct," but are based on a false assumption which grew up out of a
desire to heap contumely on Bunyan's enemies by exaggerating the severity
of his protracted, but by no means harsh imprisonment. Being arrested by
the warrant of a county magistrate for a county offence, Bunyan's place
of incarceration was naturally the county gaol. There he undoubtedly
passed the twelve years of his captivity, and there the royal warrant for
his release found him "a prisoner in the common gaol for our county of
Bedford." But though far different from the pictures which writers,
desirous of exhibiting the sufferings of the Puritan confessor in the
most telling form, have drawn--if not "a damp and dreary cell" into which
"a narrow chink admits a few scanty rays of light to render visible the
prisoner, pale and emaciated, seated on the humid earth, pursuing his
daily task to earn the morsel which prolongs his existence and his
confinement together,"--"the common gaol" of Bedford must have been a
sufficiently strait and unwholesome abode, especially for one, like the
travelling tinker, accustomed to spend the greater part of his days in
the open-air in unrestricted freedom. Prisons in those days, and indeed
long afterwards, were, at their best, foul, dark, miserable places. A
century later Howard found Bedford gaol, though better than some, in what
would now be justly deemed a disgraceful condition. One who visited
Bunyan during his confinement speaks of it as "an uncomfortable and close
prison." Bunyan however himself, in the narrative of his imprisonment,
makes no complaint of it, nor do we hear of his health having in any way
suffered from the conditions of his confinement, as was the case with not
a few of his fellow-sufferers for the sake of religion in other English
gaols, some of them even unto death. Bad as it must have been to be a