memory of Bunyan as an embodied denial of the impeachment, and as
carolling forth their cheerful rebuke of such unmanly and ungodly
plaints. With God's grace in the heart, and with the gleaming gates
of his heaven brightening the horizon beyond the grave, we may be
reformers; but it cannot be in the destructive spirit displayed by
some who, in the prophet's language, amid darkness on the earth,
"fret themselves, and curse their King and their God, and look
upward." Poverty cannot degrade, nor ignorance bedwarf, nor
persecution crush, nor dungeon enthral the free, glad spirit of a
child of God, erect in its regenerate strength, and rich in its
eternal hopes and heritage. And this hopeful and elastic temperament
colors and perfumes every treatise that Bunyan sent out even from
the precincts of his prison. With a style sinewy as Cobbett's, and
simple and clear as Swift's; with his sturdy, peasant nature showing
itself in the roundness and directness of his utterance, how little
has he of their coarseness. He was not, on the one hand, like
Cobbett, an anarchist, or libeller; but yet, on the other hand, as
little was he ever a lackey, cringing at the gates of Power, or a
train-bearer in the retinue of Fashion. Still less was he, like
Swift, the satirist of his times and of his kind, snarling at his
rulers, and turning at last to gnaw, in venomous rage, his own
heart. And yet he who portrayed the character of By-ends, and noted
the gossipings of Mrs. Bats-eyes, lacked neither keenness of vision,
nor niceness of hand, to have made him most formidable in satire and
irony.

His present station in the literature of Britain affords an
illustration, familiar and obvious to every eye, of God's
sovereignty, and of the arrangements of Him "who seeth not as man
seeth." Had Pepys, or any other contemporary courtier that hunted