the sake of his piety, while they apologized for what they deemed
his uncouthness; he is now, at last, even from men of the world, who
do not value that piety, receiving the due acknowledgment of his
rare genius and witching style. It is not many years since Gilpin,
an English clergyman of cultivated taste--himself a ready and
popular writer--issued an edition of the Pilgrim's Progress,
modified, if not rewritten in much of its phraseology, because he
deemed the original too rude for usefulness. In our own day, one of
the highest authorities as to the graces and powers of our language,
the English statesman and scholar, T. B. Macaulay, has pronounced
upon that style, which Gilpin by implication so disparaged, the most
glowing eulogies. Schools and leisure and wealth are useful, but
they are not indispensable either to felicity or to honor. Bunyan
lacked them all; and yet in the absence of them achieved greatness
--and what is far better, wide and enduring usefulness. No man, with
God's exhaustless Scriptures in his hands, and with the rich book of
nature and providence open in its pictured radiance before his eyes,
needs to have either a dwindling or an impoverished soul. Of that
latter volume, the works of God, as of that former, the word of God,
Bunyan was evidently a delighted and unwearied student. His
references to birds and insects, flowers and running brooks and
evening clouds, and forests and mountains, all show a man whose
nature was genially awake to the harmony and beauty of the material
world that lay in order and splendor around him. It was, in Bunyan,
no mere mimicry caught from books and companions--the echo of any
fashion of his times. He writes of what he had seen with his own
eyes; and seems to avoid aiming at aught beyond that. Hence to the
ocean, which probably he never thus saw--and which had he beheld it
in its placid vastness, or in its stormy wrath, he could not well
have forgotten--his writings contain, as far as we remember, no