mind, 'O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory? At this, I became both well in body and mind at once; for my sickness did presently vanish, and I walked comfortably in my work for God again."

Gifford died in 1655, having drawn up during his last illness an Epistle to his congregation, in a wise and tolerant and truly Christian spirit: he exhorted them to remember his advice that when any person was to be admitted a member of their community, that person should solemnly declare that "union with Christ was the foundation of all saints' communion," and merely an agreement concerning "any ordinances of Christ, or any judgment or opinion about externals:" and that such new members should promise that "through Grace they would would walk in love with the Church, though there should happen any difference in judgment about other things," "Concerning separation from the Church," the dying pastor pursued, "about baptism, laying on of hands, anointing with oil, psalms, or any other externals, I charge every one of you respectively as ye will give an account of it to our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge both quick and dead at his coming, that none of you be found guilty of this great evil, which some have committed, and through a zeal for God—yet not according to knowledge. They have erred from the law of the love of Christ, and have made a rent in the true church, which is but one." Mr. Ivimey, in his History of the English Baptists, says of Gifford : "His labours were apparently confined to a narrow circle; but their effects have been very widely extended, and will not pass away when time shall be no more. We allude to his having baptized and introduced to the Church the wicked Tinker of Elstow. He was doubtless the honoured Evangelist who pointed Bunyan to the Wicket Gate, by instructing him in the knowledge of the Gospel by turning him from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God. Little did he think such a chosen vessel was sent to his house, when he opened his door to admit the poor, the depraved, and the despairing Bunyan."

But the wickedness of the Tinker has been greatly overcharged; and it is taking the language of self-accusation too literally to pronounce of John Bunyan that he was at any time depraved. The worst of what he was in his worst days is to be expressed in a single word, for which we have no synonyme, the full meaning of which no circumlocution can convey, and which though it may hardly be deemed presentable in serious composition, I shall use, as Bunyan himself (no mealy-mouthed writer) would have use it, had it in his days borne the same acceptation in which it is now universally understood;-in that word then, he had been a blackguard :—

The very head and front of his offending
Hath this extent, no more.

Such he might have been expected to be by his birth, breeding and vocation, scarcely indeed by possibility could he have been otherwise; but he was never a vicious man. It has been seen that at the first reproof he shook off, at once and for ever, the practice of profane swearing, the worst if not the only sin to which he was ever addicted. He must have been still a very young man when that outward reformation took place, which little as he after

ward valued it, and insufficient as it may have been, gave evidence at least of right intentions under the direction of a strong will: and throughout his subsequent struggles of mind, the force of a diseased imagination is not more manifest, than the earnestness of his religious feelings and aspirations. His connexion with the Baptists was eventually most beneficial to him; had it not been for the encouragement which he received from them he might have lived and died a tinker; for even when he cast off, like a slough, the coarse habits of his early life, his latent powers could never, without some such encouragement and impulse, have broken through the thick ignorance with which they were incrusted.

The coarseness of that instruction could hardly be conceived if proofs of it were not preserved in his own handwriting. There is no book except the Bible which he is known to have perused so intently as the Acts and monuments of John Fox the martyrologist, one of the best of men; a work more hastily than judiciously compiled in its earlier parts, but invaluable for that greater and far more important portion which has obtained for it its popular name of the Book of Martyrs. Bunyan's own copy of this work is in existence,* and valued of course as such a relic of such a man ought to be. In each volume he has written his name beneath the title-page in a large and stout print-hand, thus:

JOHN BUNVAN

And under some of the wood-cuts he has inserted a few rhymes, which are undoubtedly his own composition; and which, though much in the manner of the verses that were printed under the illustrations to his Pilgrim's Progress, when that work was first adorned with cuts, (verses worthy of such embellishments,) are very much worse than even the worst of those. Indeed, it would not be possible to find specimens of more miserable doggerel. But as it has been proper to lay before the reader the vivid representation of Bunyan in his feverish state of enthusiasm, that the sobriety of mind into which he settled may be better appreciated and the more admired; so for a like reason is it fitting that it should be seen, from how gross and deplorable a state of

"It was purchased in the year 1780 by Mr. Wontner of the Minories; from him it descended to his daughter Mrs. Parnell of Botolph-lane; and by her obliging permission the verses have been transcribed and fac-similes taken from it. For this and for other kind assistance the present edition is indebted to Mr. Richard Thomson, author of "An Historical Essay on Magna Charta, with a General View and Explanation of the Whole of the English Charters of Liberties;"-a book as beautifully and appropriately adorned as it is elaborately and learnedly compiled.

The edition of the Acts and Monuments is that of 1641, 3 vols. folio, the last of those in black-letter, and probably the latest when it came into Bunyan's hands. One of his signatures bears the date of 1662: but the verses must undoubtedly have been written some years ealier, before the publication of his first tract.

ignorance that intellect which produced the Pilgrim's Progress worked its way. These then are the verses —

Under the print of an Owl appearing to a Council held by Pope John at Rome. (Acts and Monuments, vol. i. 781.)

Doth the owle to them apper

which putt them all into a fear
Will not the man & trubel crown

cast the owle unto the ground.

Another is here presented as it appears in his own rude handwriting under the martyrdom of Thomas Haukes-who having promised to his friends that he would lift his hand above his head toward heaven, before he gave up the ghost, in token to them that a man under the pain of such burning might keep his mind quiet and patient, lifted his scorched arms in fulfilment of that pledge, after his speech was gone, and raised them in gesture of thanksgiving triumph towards the living God.

in dovel

gom less of all
krave is and Stout and strong.
hr doth not wanne Life as dath - Rood

"

thai art obidant to the hounty.call Sighn he giur them

hear is one stout and strong in deed

he doth not waver like as doth a Reed.
a Sighn he give them yea last of all
that are obedant to the hevenly call.

Under the martyrdom of John Hus, (Acts and Mon. vol. i. 821):

heare is John hus that you may see

uesed in deed with all crulity.

But now leet us follow & look one him

Whear he is full field in deed to the brim.

Under the martyrdom of John Rogers, the Protomartyr in the Marian Per secution, (Ib. vol. iii. 133) :

It was the will of X. (Christ) that thou should die

Mr Rogers his body in the flames to fry.

O Blessed man thou did lead this bloody way,

O how wilt thou shien with X in the last day.

Under the martyrdom of Lawrence Sanders, (Ib. vol. iii. 139) :

Mr Sanders is the next blessed man in deed
And from all trubels he is made free.
Farewell world & all hear be lo

For to my dear Lord I must gooe.

There is yet one more of these tinker's tetrasticks, penned in the margin, beside the account of Gardener's death::

These curious inscriptions must have been Bunyan's first attempts in verse; he had no doubt found difficulty enough in tinkering them to make him proud of his work when it was done; for otherwise he would not have written them in a book which was the most valuable of all his goods and chattels. In latter days he seems to have taken this book for his art of poetry, and acquired from it at length the tune and the phraseology of such verses as are there inserted— with a few rare exceptions, they are of Robert Wisdom's school, and something below the pitch of Sternhold and Hopkins. But if he learned there to make bad verses, he entered fully into the spirit of its better parts, and received that spirit into as resolute a heart as ever beat in a martyr's bosom. From the examples which he found there, and from the Scriptures which he perused with such intense devotion, he derived "a rapture"

-that raising from ignorance

-Carried him up into the air of action
-And knowledge of himself:

And when the year after Gifford's death a resolution was passed by the meeting, that "some of the brethren, (one at a time,) to whom the Lord may have given a gift, be called forth, and encouraged to speak a word in the church for mutual edification," Bunyan was one of the persons so called upon. "Some,"

he says,

"of the most able among the Saints with us-I say, the most able

for judgment and holiness of life-as they conceived, did perceive that God had counted me worthy to understand something of his will in his holy and blessed Word; and had given me utterance in some measure to express what I saw to others for edification. Therefore, they desired me, and that with much earnestness, that I would be willing at some times, to take in hand in one of the meetings, to speak a word of exhortation unto them. The which, though at the first it did much dash and abash my spirit, yet being still by them desired and entreated, I consented to their request; and did twice, at two several assemblies, (but in private,) though with much weakness and infirmity, discover my gift amongst them; at which, they not only seemed to be, but did solemnly protest, as in the sight of the great God, they were both affected and comforted, and gave thanks to the Father of mercies for the grace bestowed on me."

In those days, the supply of public news came so slowly, and so scanty when it came, that even the proceedings of so humble an individual as Bunyan became matter of considerable attention in the town of Bedford. His example drew many to the Baptist-meeting, from curiosity to discover what had affected him there and produced such a change in his conversation. "When I went out to seek the Bread of Life, some of them," he says, "would follow, and the rest be put into a muse at home. Yea, almost all the town, at first, at times would go out to hear at the place where I found good. Yea, young and old for a while had some reformation on them: also some of them perceiving that God had mercy upon me, came crying to him for mercy too." Bunyan was not one of those enthusiasts who thrust themselves forward in confident reliance upon what they suppose to be an inward call. He entered upon his probation with diffidence and fear, not daring "to make use of his gift in a public way :" and gradually acquired a trust in himself and a consciousness of his own qualifications, when some of those who went into the country to disseminate their principles and make converts, took him in their company. Exercising himself thus, as occasion offered, he was encouraged by the approbation with which others heard him; and in no long time, "after some solemn prayer, with fasting, he was, more particularly called forth, and appointed to a more ordinary and public preaching, not only to and amongst them that believed, but also to offer the Gospel to those who had not yet received the faith thereof."

The Bedford meeting had at this time its regular mir ister whose name was John Burton; so that what Bunyan received was a roving commission to itinerate in the villages round about; and in this he was so much employed, that when in the ensuing year he was nominated for a deacon of the congregation, they declined electing him to that office, on the ground that he was too much engaged to attend to it. Having in previous training overcome his first diffidence, he now "felt in his mind a secret pricking forward" to this ministry; not "for desire of vain glory," for he was even at that time "sorely afflicted" concerning his own eternal state, but because the Scriptures encouraged him, by texts which ran continually in his mind, whereby "I was made," he says, "to see, that the Holy Ghost never intended that men who