lost "almost utterly." He was before long called home to help his father
at the Harrowden forge, where he says he was "brought up in a very mean
condition among a company of poor countrymen." Here, with but little to
elevate or refine his character, the boy contracted many bad habits, and
grew up what Coleridge somewhat too strongly calls "a bitter blackguard."
According to his own remorseful confession, he was "filled with all
unrighteousness," having "from a child" in his "tender years," "but few
equals both for cursing, swearing, lying and blaspheming the holy name of
God." Sins of this kind he declares became "a second nature to him;" he
"delighted in all transgression against the law of God," and as he
advanced in his teens he became a "notorious sinbreeder," the "very
ringleader," he says, of the village lads "in all manner of vice and
ungodliness." But the unsparing condemnation passed by Bunyan, after his
conversion, on his former self, must not mislead us into supposing him
ever, either as boy or man, to have lived a vicious life. "The
wickedness of the tinker," writes Southey, "has been greatly overrated,
and it is taking the language of self-accusation too literally to
pronounce of John Bunyan that he was at any time depraved." The justice
of this verdict of acquittal is fully accepted by Coleridge. "Bunyan,"
he says, "was never in our received sense of the word 'wicked.' He was
chaste, sober, and honest." He hints at youthful escapades, such,
perhaps, as orchard-robbing, or when a little older, poaching, and the
like, which might have brought him under "the stroke of the laws," and
put him to "open shame before the face of the world." But he confesses
to no crime or profligate habit. We have no reason to suppose that he
was ever drunk, and we have his own most solemn declaration that he was
never guilty of an act of unchastity. "In our days," to quote Mr.
Froude, "a rough tinker who could say as much for himself after he had
grown to manhood, would be regarded as a model of self-restraint. If in
Bedford and the neighbourhood there was no young man more vicious than