affluence and leisure, this manual may serve to commend the author's
works in their entireness. Mr. Chaplin himself would most anxiously
disavow any claim to have exhausted the mines from which he brings
these gatherings. His specimens resemble rather those laces which
the good Bunyan tagged in Bedford jail--not in themselves garments,
but merely adjuncts and ornaments of larger fabrics. He who would
see the entire wardrobe of the Dreamer's mind, and the shape and
proportions of the goodly vestures of truth in which he sought to
array himself and his readers, must, after handling these the LACES,
turn to the ROBES, from whose edge these have been skilfully
detached.

In the character and history of JOHN BUNYAN, the great Head of the
church seems to have provided a lesson of special significance, and
singular adaptedness, for the men and the strifes of our own time.
Born of the people, and in so low a condition, that one of Bunyan's
modern reviewers, by a strange mistake, construed Bunyan's
self-disparaging admissions to mean that he was the offspring of
gypsies--bred to one of the humblest of handicrafts, and having but
the scantiest advantages as to fortune or culture, he yet rose,
under the blessings of God's word and providence and Spirit, to
widest usefulness, and to an eminence that shows no tokens of
decline. Down to our own times, the branches of his expanding
influence seem daily spreading and extending themselves; and the
roots of his earthly renown seem daily shooting themselves deeper,
and taking a firmer hold on the judgment of critics and the hearts
of the churches. When the English houses of Parliament were recently
rebuilt, among the imagery commemorative of the nation's literary
glories, a place was voted for the bust of the Bedford pastor, once
so maligned and persecuted. Once tolerated by dainty Christians for