striking quality of the narrative, or the exhortations which they impart in the first words that occur to them. It is to JOHN BUNYAN, therefore, that our attention must here for a moment be given. Like Milton, he was an anachronism in the age of Charles II., and we observe with surprise that it was in an epoch of criticism, of reason, of combined experimental eclecticism, that two isolated men of genius put forth, the one an epic poem, the other a couple of religious allegories, steeped in the purest and most ideal

Bunyan

romance, and each unrivalled in its own class throughout other and more propitious ages of English literature. Nor, though the simple, racy compositions of Bunyan may not seem to have had any very direct influence on literature of the more academic kind, has the stimulus of his best books on humble minds ceased ever since, but has kept the language of the poor always hardy and picturesque, with scarcely less instant benefit than the Bible itself. Whether these narratives, and, most of all, the Life and Death of Mr. Badman, had not a direct influence on the realistic novels of the middle of the following century, is a question which criticism has scarcely decided; but that they prepared the minds of the readers of those novels is beyond all doubt.

John Bunyan (1628-1688) was the son of a
Bedfordshire, where he was born in November 1628.

tinker or brazier at Elstow, in "I was of a low and inconsider