into his wearied soul.  When once Bunyan became a free man again, his pen recovered its former copiousness of production, and the works by which he has been immortalized, “The Pilgrim’s Progress”—­which has been erroneously ascribed to Bunyan’s twelve years’ imprisonment—­and its sequel, “The Holy War,” and the “Life and Death of Mr. Badman,” and a host of more strictly theological works, followed one another in rapid succession.

Bunyan’s second term of imprisonment was certainly less severe than that which preceded it.  At its commencement we learn that, like Joseph in Egypt, he found favour in his jailer’s eyes, who “took such pity of his rigorous suffering, that he put all care and trust into his hands.”  Towards the close of his imprisonment its rigour was still further relaxed.  The Bedford church book begins its record again in 1688, after an interval of ominous silence of five years, when the persecution was at the hottest.  In its earliest entries we find Bunyan’s name, which occurs repeatedly up to the date of his final release in 1672.  Not one of these notices gives the slightest allusion of his being a prisoner.  He is deputed with others to visit and remonstrate with backsliding brethren, and fulfil other commissions on behalf of the congregation, as if he were in the full enjoyment of his liberty.  This was in the two years’ interval between the expiration of the Conventicle Act, March 2, 1667-8, and the passing of the new Act, styled by Marvell, “the quintessence of arbitrary malice,” April 11, 1670.  After a few months of hot persecution, when a disgraceful system of espionage was set on foot and the vilest wretches drove a lucrative trade as spies on “meetingers,” the severity greatly lessened.  Charles ii. was already meditating the issuing of a Declaration of Indulgence, and signified his disapprobation of the “forceable courses” in which, “the sad experience of twelve years” showed, there was “very little fruit.”  One of the first and most notable consequences of this change of policy was Bunyan’s release.

Mr. Offor’s patient researches in the State Paper Office have proved that the Quakers, than whom no class of sectaries had suffered more severely from the persecuting edicts of the Crown, were mainly instrumental in throwing open the prison doors to those who, like Bunyan, were in bonds for the sake of their religion.  Gratitude to John Groves, the Quaker mate of Tattersall’s fishing boat, in which Charles had escaped to France after the battle of Worcester, had something, and the untiring advocacy of George Whitehead, the Quaker, had still more, to do with this act of royal clemency.  We can readily believe that the good-natured Charles was not sorry to have an opportunity of evidencing his sense of former services rendered at a time of his greatest extremity.  But the main cause lay much deeper, and is connected with what Lord Macaulay justly styles “one of the worst acts of one of the worst governments that England has ever seen”—­that