family, were dependent upon charity! As soon as he could get his
tools in order he set to work; and we have the following testimony
to his industry by a fellow-prisoner, Mr. Wilson, the Baptist
minister, and of Charles Doe, who visited him in prison:--'Nor did
he, while he was in prison, spend his time in a supine and careless
manner, nor eat the bread of idleness; for there have I been
witness that his own hands have ministered to his and his family's
necessities, making many hundred gross of long tagged laces, to
fill up the vacancies of his time, which he had learned to do for
that purpose, since he had been in prison. There, also, I surveyed
his library, the least, but yet the best that e'er I saw--the Bible
and the Book of Martyrs.[245] And during his imprisonment (since I
have spoken of his library), he writ several excellent and useful
treatises, particularly The Holy City, Christian Behaviour,
The Resurrection of the Dead, and Grace Abounding to the Chief of
Sinners.'[246] Besides these valuable treatises, Charles Doe states
that, of his own knowledge, in prison Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim's
Progress, the first part, and that he had this from his own mouth.[247]
In addition to the demonstration of this important fact contained
in the introduction to The Pilgrim's Progress, there ought to
have been added, Bunyan's statement made in introducing his second
part:--'Now, having taken up my lodgings in a wood about a mile
off the place': no longer in 'a den,' but sheltered, in a wood, in
a state of comparative, but not of perfect liberty, about a mile
distant from the den in which he wrote his first part. Whether this
may refer to his former cottage at Elstow, of which there is great
doubt, or to the house he occupied in Bedford after his release,
they were equally about a mile from the jail. He certainly means
that the two parts were not written in the same place, nor is
there a shadow of a doubt as to the fact that in prison the great