as one work of his; and none has awakened so frequently the sighing
behest, "Let me die the death of the righteous."

None has painted the beauty of holiness in taints more lovely, nor
spoken in tones more thrilling to the heart of universal humanity.
At first the favourite of the vulgar, he is now the wonder of the
learned; and from the obscurity, not inglorious, of smoky cupboards
and cottage chimneys, he has been escorted up to the highest places
of classical renown, and duly canonized by the pontiffs of taste and
literature. The man, whom Cowper praised anonymously,


"Lest so despised a name should move a sneer,


has at last extorted emulous plaudits from a larger host of writers
than ever conspired to praise a man of genius, who was also a man of
God. Johnson and Franklin, Scott, Coleridge, and Southey, Byron and
Montgomery, Macintosh and Macaulay, have exerted their philosophical
acumen and poetic feeling to analyze his various spell, and account
for his unequalled fame; and though the round-cornered copies, with
their diverting woodcuts, have not disappeared from the poor man's
ingle, illustrated editions blaze from the shelves of every sumptuous
library, new pictures, from its exhaustless themes, light up the
walls of each annual exhibition; and amidst the graceful litter of
the drawing-room table, you are sure to take up designs from the
Pilgrim's Progress. So universal is the ascendancy of the tinker-
teacher, so world-wide the diocese of him whom Whitefield created
Bishop Bunyan, that probably half the ideas which the outside-world
entertains regarding experimental piety, they have, in some form or