fruits of grace and plants of righteousness, blooming and fragrant in the watered garden of his own heart.  And this dipping of the pencil into his own soul, and into the freshness of nature around him, is doubtless a part of the secret of his perpetual originality and unsating freshness.  Now, when men say repiningly, and in a temper which impeaches alike society and providence, that a lowly lot, with its necessary privations and its consequent ignorance, is a barrier, perpetual and insuperable, against usefulness and happiness and honor, we turn to the name and memory of Bunyan as an embodied denial of the impeachment, and as carolling forth their cheerful rebuke of such unmanly and ungodly plaints.  With God’s grace in the heart, and with the gleaming gates of his heaven brightening the horizon beyond the grave, we may be reformers; but it cannot be in the destructive spirit displayed by some who, in the prophet’s language, amid darkness on the earth, “fret themselves, and curse their King and their God, and look upward.”  Poverty cannot degrade, nor ignorance bedwarf, nor persecution crush, nor dungeon enthral the free, glad spirit of a child of God, erect in its regenerate strength, and rich in its eternal hopes and heritage.  And this hopeful and elastic temperament colors and perfumes every treatise that Bunyan sent out even from the precincts of his prison.  With a style sinewy as Cobbett’s, and simple and clear as Swift’s; with his sturdy, peasant nature showing itself in the roundness and directness of his utterance, how little has he of their coarseness.  He was not, on the one hand, like Cobbett, an anarchist, or libeller; but yet, on the other hand, as little was he ever a lackey, cringing at the gates of Power, or a train-bearer in the retinue of Fashion.  Still less was he, like Swift, the satirist of his times and of his kind, snarling at his rulers, and turning at last to gnaw, in venomous rage, his own heart.  And yet he who portrayed the character of By-ends, and noted the gossipings of Mrs. Bats-eyes, lacked neither keenness of vision, nor niceness of hand, to have made him most formidable in satire and irony.

His present station in the literature of Britain affords an illustration, familiar and obvious to every eye, of God’s sovereignty, and of the arrangements of Him “who seeth not as man seeth.”  Had Pepys, or any other contemporary courtier that hunted for place and pension, or fluttered in levity and sin, in the antechambers of the later Stuarts, been asked, who of all the writers of the times were likely to go down to posterity among the lights of their age, how ludicrously erroneous would have been his apportionments of fame.  Pepys might, from the Puritan education of his boyhood, have named Owen, Bates, and Baxter; or from the Conformist associations of his later years, have selected South, or Patrick, or Tillotson, as the religious writers who had surpassed all rivalry, or named a Walton or Castell, as having