down again, whence it rose,-its course unfinished,-the world in darkness? Shall it not rather ride upward to its meridian, in a bright and unclouded path, illumine the universe, and if it descend at all, sink placidly in the west, only when time shall cease? We believe it will be thus. It is the voice of history.

We have left ourselves no room to speak of the revolutions, that have succeeded our own; and we need none. They have been too clearly the manifestations of the same principles which we have traced through history, too intimately connected with our own Revolution, to require extended comment. They tell the same story, which we have learned from their predecessors, that there is a power in man, which will struggle on till it completes its work; a power, which, though sometimes rash and misguided, is yet strong, in the end, for good. They are parts, therefore, of the same series we have been considering. In this view, they should be considered. In this view, their temporary evils can be overlooked. We can hail their principles, as the same for which past generations and even ourselves have labored, and therein can argue for them eventual success. We would, that these principles might triumph without convulsions, that reason might supersede the sword. But this may not be at present. Other revolutions must be met and passed through. We can but pray that the leaders of them may be just, true, patriotic, and disinterested,not, however, because we believe that the result is in their hands. There is a higher power, which has watched over, and will continue to watch over that result. But the leaders may do much to shorten or prolong the struggle. We pray, therefore, that they may be patriots indeed,-and that the time may soon come, when in the history of mankind shall be read the perfect triumph of freedom, religion and right.

ART. VII.-Southey's Life of Bunyan.

The Pilgrim's Progress. With a Life of John Bunyan. BY ROBERT SOUTHEY, Esq., LL. D., Poet Laureate, &c. &c. &c., and Illustrations by Martin and Harvey. London.

1830.

The seventeenth century in English Literature is a period we love to dwell upon. There is nothing in any other nation to be compared with it. It is an age to study; a vast Peruvian mine; its riches are inexhaustible, because it is the Empire of THOUGHT. Gold became like iron, and silver like stones in the street. The whole aspect of the age is one of massy, cumbrous, intellectual magnificence. Their intellectual enterprises, like their scale of architecture, were gigantic. Immense buttresses propped the battlemented walls of their castles; great oaken beams roofed their halls; so, the very frame-work of their mental edifices, it would take the libraries of Europe to supply, and the giants of old to put together.

The power of the English tongue was tried in every way. It blazes with magnificence; subdues by its strength; and charms by its surpassing simplicity. The native energies and original traits of the nation were tried and displayed in like manner. The period succeeding the Reformation was exuberantly productive of great and good men. It was like

the soil beneath a North American forest, when its bosom has been opened to the light in a clearing, and its accumulated mould of a thousand years upturned to the sun, and laid in rich furrows by the plough. The influence of Luther's intellect abroad was accompanied in England by peculiar commotions, both religious and civil, which dispelled the lethargy of the national mind, heaving it into surges from its most silent depths. Then arose men, whose names will be watchwords of glory to the human race.

Among the host of venerated names that adorn the history of this period, if we should select five, as indicating perhaps the most original and powerful minds that England ever nourished, they would be these:-Dr. Henry More, John Milton, Shakspeare, Bacon, and John Bunyan. Of these, for origiVOL. XXXVI.-NO. 79.

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nality of genius, Bunyan stands in the foremost rank. Compare his intellectual discipline with that of Shakspeare, and it will be found, that, though neither of them had much to boast on the score of education, Shakspeare's was immeasurably superior. Almost the only books Bunyan ever read (at least before he wrote the Pilgrim's Progress) were the Bible, the Book of Martyrs, and two volumes, The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven, and The Practice of Piety, which formed the marriage portion of his wife. Of this latter book, composed by Bayley, Bishop of Bangor, more than fifty editions are said to have been published in the course of a hundred

years.

Bunyan, more than others, was a mind from the people. He worked his way out of the ignorance and vice by which he was surrounded, against much opposition, and with scarcely the slightest aid from any of his fellow creatures. His genius pursued a path dictated by his piety, and one that no other being in the world ever pursued before him. The light that first broke through his darkness was from Heaven. It found him, even that being who wrote the Pilgrim's Progress, coarse, profane, boisterous, and almost brutal. It shone before him, and with a single eye he followed it, till his native City of Destruction could no longer be seen in the distance, till his moral deformities fell from him, and his garments became purity and light. The Spirit of God was his teacher; the very discipline of his intellect was a spiritual discipline; the conflicts that his soul sustained with the Powers of Darkness were the very sources of his intellectual strength.

Southey calls the experience of this man, in one stage of it, a burning and feverish enthusiasm. Cowper, in one of his letters to Lady Hesketh, after describing his own feelings, remarks, What I have written would appear like enthusiasm to many, for we are apt to give that name to every warm affection of the mind in others, which we have not experienced in ourselves.' We incline to think that Southey, with all his talent, is incapable of fully appreciating a character of such directness and originality as that of Bunyan, or of doing justice to the workings of his mind. It would have been the truth, as well as the better philosophy, if he had said that the Spirit of God was preparing Bunyan, by that severe discipline, to send forth into the world the Pilgrim's Progress. And when he was at length prepared for the task, then an over

ruling Providence placed him, through the instrumentality of his own enemies, in the prison of Bedford to accomplish it.

Bunyan has given a powerful relation of his own religious experience, in a little work entitled 'Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners.' He says of it himself, I could have stepped into a style much higher than this, in which I have here discoursed, and could have adorned all things more than here I have seemed to do: but I dare not.' The very extreme plainness of this work adds to its power. Never was the inward life of any being depicted with more vehement and burning language: it is an intensely vivid description of the workings of a mind of the keenest sensibility and most fervid imagination, convinced of guilt, and fully awake to all the dread realities of Eternity. In this work we behold not only the general discipline by which Bunyan attained that spiritual wisdom and experience exhibited in the Pilgrim's Progress, but there are particular passages of it, in which we see the evident germs of that work of genius.

'While Bunyan was in this state,' says Mr. Southey, 'a translation of Luther's Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians fell into his hands, an old book, so tattered and thumb-worn, "that it was ready to fall piece from piece, if he did but turn it over." Here, in the work of that passionate and mighty mind, he saw his own soul reflected as in a glass. "I had but a little way perused it," he says, "when I found my condition in his experience so largely and profoundly handled, as if his book had been written out of my heart." And in later life he thought it his duty to declare, that he preferred this book of Martin Luther before all the books he had ever seen, (the Bible alone excepted) as fittest for a wounded conscience.'

Southey quotes a passage from one of Bunyan's works, which he says is worthy of notice, because it is in Bishop Latimer's vein.' Those of our readers, who are familiar with the writings of Luther, will recognise in it a strong resemblance to the manner of the great reformer. Of the work from which it is extracted, Southey says,

'No doubt it contains the substance of some of his sermons; and to sermons in such a strain, however hearers might differ in taste and in opinions, there are none who would not listen.'— They that will have Heaven must run for it, because the Devil, the Law, Sin, Death and Hell follow them. There is never a

poor soul that is going to Heaven, but the Devil, the Law, Sin, Death and Hell make after that soul. The Devil, your adversary, as a roaring Lion, goeth about, seeking whom he may devour.' And I will assure you, the Devil is nimble; he can run apace; he is light of foot; he hath overtaken many; he hath turned up their heels, and hath given them an everlasting fall. Also the Law! that can shoot a great way: have a care thou keep out of the reach of those great guns the Ten Commandments! Hell also hath a wide mouth; and can stretch itself farther than you are aware of! And as the Angel said to Lot, 'take heed, look not behind thee, neither tarry thou in all this plain, (that is, any where between this and Heaven,) lest thou be consumed,' so say I to thee, take heed, tarry not, lest either the Devil, Hell, Death, or the fearful curses of the Law of God do overtake thee, and throw thee down in the midst of thy sins, so as never to rise and recover again. If this were well considered, then thou, as well as I, wouldst say, they that will have Heaven must run for it.

Bunyan always preached what he saw and felt,' and so the character of his preaching varied with the aspect which Divine Truth, in the coloring of his personal hopes and fears, wore to his own soul. How he preached, when himself amidst the terrors of his own Pilgrim in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, may be gathered from his own mouth.

'This part of my work,' says he, 'I fulfilled with great sense: for the terrors of the Law, and Guilt for my transgressions, lay heavy upon my conscience. I preached what I felt,—what smartingly I did feel,— -even that under which my poor soul did groan and tremble to astonishment. Indeed I have been as one sent to them from the dead. I went myself in chains, to preach to them in chains; and carried that fire in my own conscience, that I persuaded them to be aware of. I can truly say, that when I have been to preach, I have gone full of Guilt and Terror even to the Pulpit door; and there it hath been taken off, and I have been at liberty in my mind until I have done my work; and then immediately, even before I could get down the Pulpit stairs, I have been as bad as I was before. Yet God carried me on; but surely with a strong hand, for neither Guilt nor Hell could take me off my work.'

Bunyan's features of character were naturally strong, and good, so far as unperverted. Yet if he had not been turned towards Heaven, he was likely to make a man of great wickedness.