what he had felt.  The experience was a very tremendous reality to him.  Like Dante, if he had not actually been in hell, he had been on the very threshold of it; he had in very deed traversed “the Valley of the Shadow of Death,” had heard its “hideous noises,” and seen “the Hobgoblins of the Pit.”  He “spake what he knew and testified what he had seen.”  Every sentence breathes the most tremendous earnestness.  His words are the plainest, drawn from his own homely vernacular.  He says in his preface, which will amply repay reading, as one of the most characteristic specimens of his style, that he could have stepped into a higher style, and adorned his narrative more plentifully.  But he dared not.  “God did not play in convincing him.  The devil did not play in tempting him.  He himself did not play when he sunk as into a bottomless pit, and the pangs of hell caught hold on him.  Nor could he play in relating them.  He must be plain and simple and lay down the thing as it was.  He that liked it might receive it.  He that did not might produce a better.”  The remembrance of “his great sins, his great temptations, his great fears of perishing for ever, recalled the remembrance of his great help, his great support from heaven, the great grace God extended to such a wretch as he was.”  Having thus enlarged on his own experience, he calls on his spiritual children, for whose use the work was originally composed and to whom it is dedicated,—­“those whom God had counted him worthy to beget to Faith by his ministry in the Word”—­to survey their own religious history, to “work diligently and leave no corner unsearched.”  He would have them “remember their tears and prayers to God; how they sighed under every hedge for mercy.  Had they never a hill Mizar (Psa. xlii. 6) to remember?  Had they forgotten the close, the milkhouse, the stable, the barn, where God visited their souls?  Let them remember the Word on which the Lord had caused them to hope.  If they had sinned against light, if they were tempted to blaspheme, if they were down in despair, let them remember that it had been so with him, their spiritual father, and that out of them all the Lord had delivered him.”  This dedication ends thus:  “My dear children, the milk and honey is beyond this wilderness.  God be merciful to you, and grant you be not slothful to go in to possess the land.”

This remarkable book, as we learn from the title-page, was “written by his own hand in prison.”  It was first published by George Larkin in London, in 1666, the sixth year of his imprisonment, the year of the Fire of London, about the time that he experienced his first brief release.  As with “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” the work grew in picturesque detail and graphic power in the author’s hand after its first appearance.  The later editions supply some of the most interesting personal facts contained in the narrative, which were wanting when it first issued from the press.  His two escapes