To the names of Baxter and Howe must be added the name of a man far below them in station and in acquired knowledge, but in virtue their equal, and in genius their superior, John Bunyan.  Bunyan had been bred a tinker, and had served as a private soldier in the parliamentary army.  Early in his life he had been fearfully tortured by remorse for his youthful sins, the worst of which seem, however, to have been such as the world thinks venial.  His keen sensibility and his powerful imagination made his internal conflicts singularly terrible.  He fancied that he was under sentence of reprobation, that he had committed blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, that he had sold Christ, that he was actually possessed by a demon.  Sometimes loud voices from heaven cried out to warn him.  Sometimes fiends whispered impious suggestions in his ear.  He saw visions of distant mountain-tops, on which the sun shone brightly, but from which he was separated by a waste of snow.  He felt the devil behind him pulling his clothes.  He thought, that the brand of Cain had been set upon him.  He feared that he was about to burst asunder like Judas.  His mental agony disordered his health.  One day he shook like a man in the palsy.  On another day he felt a fire within his breast.  It is difficult to understand how he survived sufferings so intense and so long-continued.  At length the clouds broke.  From the depths of despair the penitent passed to a state of serene felicity.  An irresistible impulse now urged him to impart to others the blessing of which he was himself possessed.  He joined the Baptists, and became a preacher and writer.  His education had been that of a mechanic.  He knew no language but the English, as it was spoken by the common people.  He had studied no great model of composition, with the exception—­an important exception undoubtedly—­of our noble translation of the Bible.  His spelling was bad.  He frequently transgressed the rules of grammar.  Yet his native force of genius, and his experimental knowledge of all the religious passions, from despair to ecstasy, amply supplied in him the want of learning.  His rude oratory roused and melted hearers who listened without interest to the labored discourses of great logicians and Hebraists.  His works were widely circulated among the humbler classes.  One of them, the Pilgrim’s Progress, was in his own lifetime translated into several foreign languages.  It was, however, scarcely known to the learned and polite, and had been during nearly a century the delight of pious cottagers and artisans before it was publicly commended by any man of high literary eminence.  At length critics condescended to inquire where the secret of so wide and so durable a popularity lay.  They were compelled to own that the ignorant multitude had judged more correctly than the learned, and that the despised little book was really a masterpiece.  Bunyan is indeed as decidedly the first of allegorists as Demosthenes is the first of orators, or Shakspeare the first of dramatists.  Other allegorists have shown equal ingenuity, but no other allegorist has ever been able to touch the heart, and to make abstractions objects of terror, of pity, and of love.