of the “Scriptural Poems,” published for the first time twelve years after his death, the genuineness of which, though questioned by Dr. Brown, there seems no sufficient reason to doubt, the little education he had was “gained in a grammar school.”  This would have been that founded by Sir William Harpur in Queen Mary’s reign in the neighbouring town of Bedford.  Thither we may picture the little lad trudging day by day along the mile and a half of footpath and road from his father’s cottage by the brookside, often, no doubt, wet and miry enough, not, as he says, to “go to school to Aristotle or Plato,” but to be taught “according to the rate of other poor men’s children.”  The Bedford schoolmaster about this time, William Barnes by name, was a negligent sot, charged with “night-walking” and haunting “taverns and alehouses,” and other evil practices, as well as with treating the poor boys “when present” with a cruelty which must have made them wish that his absences, long as they were, had been more protracted.  Whether this man was his master or no, it was little that Bunyan learnt at school, and that little he confesses with shame he soon lost “almost utterly.”  He was before long called home to help his father at the Harrowden forge, where he says he was “brought up in a very mean condition among a company of poor countrymen.”  Here, with but little to elevate or refine his character, the boy contracted many bad habits, and grew up what Coleridge somewhat too strongly calls “a bitter blackguard.”  According to his own remorseful confession, he was “filled with all unrighteousness,” having “from a child” in his “tender years,” “but few equals both for cursing, swearing, lying and blaspheming the holy name of God.”  Sins of this kind he declares became “a second nature to him;” he “delighted in all transgression against the law of God,” and as he advanced in his teens he became a “notorious sinbreeder,” the “very ringleader,” he says, of the village lads “in all manner of vice and ungodliness.”  But the unsparing condemnation passed by Bunyan, after his conversion, on his former self, must not mislead us into supposing him ever, either as boy or man, to have lived a vicious life.  “The wickedness of the tinker,” writes Southey, “has been greatly overrated, and it is taking the language of self-accusation too literally to pronounce of John Bunyan that he was at any time depraved.”  The justice of this verdict of acquittal is fully accepted by Coleridge.  “Bunyan,” he says, “was never in our received sense of the word ‘wicked.’  He was chaste, sober, and honest.”  He hints at youthful escapades, such, perhaps, as orchard-robbing, or when a little older, poaching, and the like, which might have brought him under “the stroke of the laws,” and put him to “open shame before the face of the world.”  But he confesses to no crime or profligate habit.  We have no reason to suppose that he was ever drunk, and we have his own most solemn declaration that he was never guilty of an act of