Another book which played a large part in Bunyan’s life was the short biography of Francis Spira, an Italian, who had died shortly before Bunyan’s time.  Spira had been a Protestant lawyer in Italy, but had found it expedient to abate the open profession of Protestantism with which he began, and eventually to transfer his allegiance to the Roman Church.  The biography is for the most part an account of his death-bed conversation, which lasted a long time, since his illness was even more of the mind than of the body.  It is an extremely ghastly account of a morbid and insane melancholia.  It was the fashion of the time to take such matters spiritually rather than physically, and we read that many persons went to his death-bed and listened to his miserable cries and groanings in the hope of gaining edification for their souls.  How the book came into Bunyan’s hands no one can tell, but evidently he had found it in English translation, and many of the darkest parts of Grace Abounding are directly due to it, while the Man in the Iron Cage quotes the very words of Spira.

Another book which Bunyan had read was Luther’s Commentary on the Galatians.  The present writer possesses a copy of that volume dated 1786, at the close of which there are fourteen pages, on which long lists of names are printed.  The names are those of weavers, shoe-makers, and all sorts of tradesmen in the western Scottish towns of Kilmarnock, Paisley, and others of that neighbourhood, who had subscribed for a translation of the commentary that they might read it in their own tongue.  This curious fact reminds us that the book had among the pious people of our country an audience almost as enthusiastic as Bunyan himself was.  Another of his books, and the only one quoted by name in the Pilgrim’s Progress or Grace Abounding, with the exception of Luther on Galatians, is Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, traces of which are unmistakable in such incidents as the trial and death of Faithful and in other parts.

In these few volumes may be summed up the entire literary knowledge which Bunyan is known to have possessed.  He stands apart from mere book-learning, and deals with life rather through his eyes and ears directly than through the medium of books.  But then those eyes and ears of his were no ordinary organs; and his imagination, whose servants they were, was quick to enlist every vital and suggestive image and idea for its own uses.  Thus the rich store of observation which he had already laid up through the medium of puppet plays, fragments of song and popular story, was all at his disposal when he came to need it.  Further, even in his regenerate days, there was no dimming of the imaginative faculty nor of the observant.  The whole neighbourhood in which he lived was an open book, in which he read the wonderful story of life in many tragic and comic tales of actual fact; and in the prison where he spent twelve years, he must often have heard from his fellow-prisoners such fragments