taken bonds of fame for the perpetuity of their influence.  Had he known of Clarendon’s preparations to become the historian of the Commonwealth and Restoration, or of Burnet’s habits of preserving memoirs of the incidents and characters around him, he might have conjectured their probable honors in after-times.  But in poetry he would have classed Dryden the royalist far above Milton the republican apologist of regicide; and might, aping the fashions of the palace, have preferred to either the author of Hudibras together with the lewd playwrights who were the delight of a shameless court—­hailing the last as the most promising candidates for posthumous celebrity.  How little could he have dreamed that among these Puritans and Non-conformists, whose unpopular cause he had himself deserted, and whom his royal masters Charles and James had betrayed, amerced, exiled, and incarcerated; in those conventicles so closely watched and so sternly visited, which these persecuted confessors yet by stealth maintained; aye, and in those dungeons, whither the informer so often from these conventicles dragged them, British freedom had its truest guardians, and British literature some of its noblest illustrations.  How little thought he that God had there, in his old and glorious school of trial, his “hidden ones,” like Bunyan, whose serene testimony was yet to shine forth victorious over wrong and neglect, and reproach and ridicule, eclipsing so many contemporary celebrities, and giving to the homes and the sanctuaries of every land inhabited by an English race, one of the names “men will not willingly let die.”  How little could gilded and callous favorites of the palace have dreamed that their Acts of Uniformity and Five-mile Acts, and the like legislation of ecclesiastical proscription, were but rearing for the best men of the age, in the prisons where they had been immured, a Patmos, serene though stern, where the sufferer withdrew from man to commune with the King of kings.  There the prisoned student was receiving for the churches new lessons of surpassing beauty and potency; and the confessor, pillaged by informers and bullied by judges, and lamented in his own stricken household and desolate home, but only derided by his godless sovereign and heartless courtiers, yet often found himself compensated for every loss, when, like an earlier witness for the gospel of the Cross, enwrapped “In the spirit, on the lord’s day.”  Such were the schools where Non-conformist piety received its temper, its edge, and its lustre.  The story of Bunyan is, we say, one of the golden threads binding together into harmony and symmetry, what, seen apart, seem but fragmentary and incoherent influences—­the track of a divine Providence controlling the fates and reputations of the race.  It is a Providence disappointing men’s judgments and purposes, exalting the lowly and depressing the illustrious, rebuking despondency on the one hand and on the other