no ordinary eyes to trace their movements, and appreciate their tactics. Young Bunyan did both, and remembered them all through life, although he had no motive, whilst observing them, but the gratification of his own curiosity. Neither the battle nor the siege suggested to him a single thought, at the time, beyond their political bearings, or their military character; but both came back upon him in all their "circumstance," as well as "pomp," when he became "the prisoner of the Lord." Then he sang:

""Tis strange to me, that they that love to tell
Things done of old, yea, and that do excel
Their equals in Histriology,

Speak not of MANSOUL's wars; but let them lie
Dead, like old fables, or such worthless things,

That to the Reader no advantage brings;

When men (let them make what they will their own)
Till they know this, are to themselves unknown.--
I saw the Prince's armed men come down
By troops, by thousands, to besiege the town;
I saw the Captains; heard the Trumpets sound;
And how His forces covered all the ground.
Yea, how they set themselves in battle 'ray,

I shall remember to my dying day.

I saw the Colors waving in the wind;

I saw the Mounts cast up against the town,
And how the Slings were placed to beat it down ;
I heard the Stones fly whizzing by my ears,
(What's longer kept in mind, than got in fears?)
I heard them fall, and saw what work they made,
And how old MARS did cover with his shade."

Holy War.

CHAPTER III.

BUNYAN'S MARRIAGE.

His moral reformation, such as it was at first, began with his marriage. This interesting fact has been too baldly told hitherto. There was more information to be obtained than the bare fact, that "his career of vice received a considerable check, in consequence of his marriage."-Scott's Life.

Bad as Bunyan was, he had still some friends at Elstow, or in Bedford. This appears from the sketch of his Life in the British Museum. "The few friends he had, thought that changing his condition to the married state might reform him, and therefore urged him to it as a seasonable and comfortable advantage. But the difficult thing was, that his poverty, and irregular course of life, made it very difficult for him to get a wife suitable to his inclination and because none of the rich would yield to his solicitations, he found himself constrained to marry one without any fortune.

:

"She was very virtuous, loving, and conformably obedient and obliging; having been born of good, honest, godly parents, who had instructed her, as well as they were able, in the ways of truth and saving knowledge. Her husband going on at the old rate, she endeavored to make him see his wicked ways, and laid before his eyes the vanity of sin, and the danger that attended its wages-being no less than death, and that not temporal, but eternal death: and having two or three books left her, which, it seems, was all, or the greatest part of her dowry, she

frequently enticed him to read in them, and apply the use of them to the reforming his manners and saving his soul.”—P. 15.

This, as we shall see, may be safely taken for fact, although the author, in the next page, misstates the time of Bunyan's enlistment, which he places after the marriage. He mistakes, however, more than dates. He assigns, as Bunyan's reason for enlisting, the want of work to "support himself and his small family" during "the unnatural civil wars." He adds, however, his own refutation, although unawares; for he places him at the siege of Leicester in 1645; and then, we know, he was only seventeen years of age. Besides, he himself says expressly, "Presently after this, I changed my condition into a married state." He does not mean, however, presently after the siege; but after quitting the army, which he seems to have done soon. Southey says, that Bunyan was probably not nineteen when he married. This conclusion is just, although not warranted by the premises it is drawn from. "He married presently after his substitute had been killed at the siege of Leicester," the Doctor says. The conclusion from this would be, "probably, therefore, when he was only seventeen;" for he was born in 1628, and the siege occurred June 17th, 1645.

Dr.

But, whatever the interval was, between his discharge and his marriage, it was during that interval he made the friends who planned and urged his marriage. And on his return from the army, Bunyan was likely to gain friends, although he returned home unimproved in character. He had seen the wonders of Naseby, and the recapture of Leicester; and, if he followed Fairfax to Taunton, he had encamped at STONEHENGE by the way, and thus seen the mysterious temple of Druidism, (Rushworth)-scenes which would not be lost upon him. His bold and vivid imagination was sure to be fired by them, and his fluency enabled him to depict them. We have seen that he both observed well when in the army, and remembered well after

wards. It is, therefore, no conjecture, that the soldier of even this single campaign would be welcome at Bedford. The royal cause had few friends there: the parliamentary had many. Thus Bunyan would soon be in request, even amongst men who had formerly shunned his company. Curiosity, at a time of high excitement, can easily invent for conscience an excuse for getting information from any quarter, on a favorite subject.

Besides, Bunyan's signal escape at the siege would draw upon him the special notice of godly men then. They were close students of Providence, and firm believers in that sovereignty

of

grace which occasionally arrests some of the most reckless. It is, therefore, highly probable, that when the young Blasphemer returned unhurt, some of the aged Believers in Bedford would feel deeply interested in him, under the hope that God had some wise and gracious end in view, for thus wonderfully sparing such a rebel. And thus, between what God had done for him, and what Bunyan had seen and could say of the campaign, a new class of men were very likely to seek his company, when he resumed his craft.

It is on these grounds, I feel warranted to adopt the oldest version of the origin of Bunyan's marriage: "the few friends he had, thought that changing to the married state might reform him; and therefore urged him to it as a seasonable advantage." If this reasoning be valid, he was not, even in his worst state, a cruel or unamiable man. He was boisterous, and perhaps turbulent; but not harsh, nor vindictive. Had he been so, no decent woman could have been tempted to marry him; for he had literally nothing in the world but the tools of his craft. In like manner, had he been a sensualist, his friends could not have induced "a very virtuous woman, born of good, honest, godly parents," to have him. There must, therefore, notwithstanding all his faults, have been something loveable about him. The very fact, that they had not so much between them "as a dish or a

spoon," proves that he must have had some endearing quality. It proves, too, I readily grant, that she had but little prudence, even if she married him for the express purpose of mending him.

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That this was her purpose, is evident. Bunyan himself says, 'My mercy was, to light upon a wife whose father was counted godly. She would be often telling of me what a godly man her father was, and how he would correct and reprove vice, both in his house and among his neighbors; and what a strict and holy life he lived in his days, both in words and deeds."

Bunyan's second wife was certainly a heroine, well deserving, as we shall see, a comparison with Lady Russel, or with the wife of Grotius: but it required as much, if not more heroism, although of another kind, to attempt the conversion of the Tinker, as to plead the cause of the Prisoner. And this was done so wisely, by showing him what he should be, in vivid pictures of what her father had been, that I must, in spite of the lack of both "dish and spoon" betwixt them, withdraw my charge of imprudence from her memory. Dr. Southey says, "There was no imprudence in this early marriage:" and I will believe him, although not for the first reason he assigns, that “ Bunyan had a trade that he could trust;" but for the second (putting my own sense upon the words), that "she had been trained up the way she should go." She went the right way to work, in trying to reform her husband. An imprudent woman would have reproved him; but Mrs. Bunyan led him to realize how her father would have called him over the coals, had he been alive. Bunyan was just the man to realize this; and it was only what he would have expected from a Puritan. It was not, however, what he would have brooked at that time from his wife. had both the good sense, and the good taste, to perceive this; and, therefore, instead of upbraiding her husband, praised her father, until Bunyan saw, as in a glass, the contrast between

in

She