66

order, the people in their right wits, and news or no news to be the question, a public Mercury should never have my vote; because I think it makes the multitude too familiar with the actions and counsels of their superiors, too pragmatical and censorious, and gives them not only an itch, but a kind of colourable right and license to be meddling with the government." Still he would do what he might to "redeem the vulgar from their former mistakes and illusions." As for reports of debates in Parliament, “I have observed,” says L'Estrange, very ill effects many times from the ordinary written papers of Parliament news" —such as Andrew Marvell supplied regularly to his constituents -"by making the coffee-houses and all the popular clubs judges of those councils and deliberations which they have nothing to do withall." In November, 1665, when the plague in London had driven the Court to Oxford, appeared No. 1 of "The Oxford Gazette." When the Court returned to London, it appeared, on the 5th of February, 1666, as The London Gazette," under which name it still exists. It was placed at once under Sir Joseph Williamson, Under-Secretary of State (from whom Addison had his Christian name), and his deputy writer of it was, for the first five years, Charles Perrot, M.A., of Oriel. L'Estrange set up, in November, 1675, the first commercial journal, "The City Mercury," and in 1679 an "Observator," in defence of the king's party. In April, 1680, the first literary journal appeared, as a weekly or fortnightly catalogue of new books, the "Mercurius Librarius." Roger L'Estrange was a busy man. He published, in 1678, an abstract of "Seneca's Morals," and in 1680 a translation of "Tully's Offices." James II. knighted him, and he published in 1687, in the king's interest, A Brief History of the Times," chiefly about what was called the Popish Plot. He died in 1704.

12. In March, 1698, Jeremy Collier (b. 1650, d. 1726) published "A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage: Together with the Sense of Antiquity upon the Argument." It spoke clearly and sharply the minds of many, passed through several editions within a year, and raised a controversy in which the wits were worsted. Collier was a divine educated at Cambridge, who had been Rector of Ampton, Suffolk, then Lecturer at Gray's Inn, and one of the non-jurors at the Revolution, and had been imprisoned in Newgate for maintaining the cause of James II. He had earned credit by writing "Essays upon Several Moral Subjects"-Pride, Duelling, General Kindness, Fame, etc.when he made his plain-spoken but intemperate attack on the immodesty and profaneness of the stage of his own time, with

evidence drawn from Dryden, and from the last new plays of Congreve and Vanbrugh. He published in the year of Queen Anne's death the second of the two folio volumes of his "Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain, chiefly of England, from the First Planting of Christianity to the End of the Reign of King Charles the Second, with a brief Account of the Affairs of Religion in Ireland, collected from the best Ancient Historians." In 1721 appeared the original supplement to his translation of Moreri's "Great Historical, Geographical, Genealogical Dictionary," which he had issued in three volumes folio in 1701 and 1706.

13. Gerard Langbaine was son of a learned father of like name, who edited Longinus, and became keeper of the archives and provost of Queen's College, Oxford. Langbaine, the younger, was born at Oxford, in 1656, and took lively interest in the stage. He became senior beadle of the university, and died in 1692. He wrote an appendix to a cataJogue of graduates, a new catalogue of English plays, and published at Oxford, in 1691, "An Account of the English Dramatic Poets; or, some Observations and Remarks on the Lives and Writings of all those that have published either Comedies, Tragedies, Tragi-Comedies, Pastorals, Masques, Interludes, Farces, or Operas, in the English Tongue." Langbaine spoke in this book of Wycherley as one whom he was proud to call his friend, and a "gentleman whom I may boldly reckon among poets of the first rank, no man that I know, except the excellent Jonson, having outdone him in comedy." Of Shadwell, Langbaine said, “I own I like his comedies better than Mr. Dryden's, as having more variety of characters, and those drawn from the life. That Mr. Shadwell has preferred Ben Jonson for his model I am very certain of; and those who will read the preface to 'The Humorists' may be sufficiently satisfied what a value he has for that great man; but how far he has succeeded in his design I shall leave to the reader's examination." Of Shadwell's play of "The Virtuoso," printed in 1676, Langbaine said that the University of Oxford had applauded it, "and, as no man ever undertook to discover the frailties of such pretenders to this kind of knowledge before Mr. Shadwell, so none since Mr. Jonson's time ever drew so many different characters of humor, and with such success."

...

CHAPTER XI.

SECOND HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS

WRITERS.

1. John Bunyan.-2. Richard Baxter.-3. John Howe.-4. George Fox.-5. Rob. ert Barclay.-6. William Penn. — 7. Sir George Mackenzie. — 8. Isaac Barrow. 9. John Tillotson.-10. Robert Leighton.-11. William Beveridge. — 12. Samuel Parker. - 13. Thomas Ken; George Morley.-14. William Sherlock. 15. Robert South; Edward Stillingfleet; Thomas Tenison.

1. John Bunyan was born in tinker, at Elstow, in Bedfordshire.

1628, the son of a poor

He was sent to a free school

for the poor, and then worked with his father. As a youth of seventeen he was combatant in the civil war. He was married, at nineteen, to a wife who helped him to recover the art of reading, over the only books she had "The Practice of Piety and "The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven." He went regularly to church, but joined in the sports after the Sunday afternoon's service, which had been a point of special defiance to the Puritans, by the proclamation of James I. in 1618, re-issued by Charles I. in 1633. Once Bunyan was arrested in his Sunday sport by the imagination of a voice from heaven. Presently he gave up swearing, bell-ringing, and games and dances on the green. Then came the time of what he looked upon as his conversion, brought about by hearing the conversation of some women as he stood near with his tinker's barrow. They referred him to their minister. He says that lie was tempted to sell Christ, and heard, when in bed one morning, a voice that reiterated," Sell Him, sell Him, sell Him." This condition was followed by illness which was mistaken for consumption; but Bunyan recovered, and became robust. In 1657 he was deacon of his church at Bedford, and his private exhortations caused him to be invited to take turns in village preaching.

Country people came to him by hundreds. Only ordained ministers might preach. In 1658 complaint was lodged against Bunyan; but under the Commonwealth he was left unmolested.

Upon the Restoration, still incurring the penalty for unauthorized preaching, he was committed to prison in November, 1660, on the charge of going about to several conventicles in the country, to the great disparagement of the government of the Church of England. He was sent, aged thirty-two, to Bedford Jail for three months. As he would not conform at the end of that time, he was recommitted. He was not included in the general jail delivery at the coronation of Charles II., in April, 1661. His wife she was his second wife-appealed three times to the judges, and urged that she had four small children that cannot help themselves, one of which is blind, and we have nothing to live upon but the charity of good people." She appealed in vain. "I found myself," said Bunyan, 66 encompassed with infirmities. The parting with my wife and poor children hath often been to me in this place as the pulling of the flesh from the bones, and that not only because I am somewhat too fond of these great mercies, but also because I should have often brought to my mind the many hardships, miseries, and wants that my poor family was like to meet with should I be taken from them, especially my poor blind child, who lay nearer my heart than all besides. Oh! the thoughts of the hardships I thought my poor blind one might go under would break my heart to pieces. Poor child!' thought I, 'what sorrow art thou like to have for thy portion in this world! Thou must be beaten, must beg, suffer hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I cannot now endure the wind should blow upon thee.' So felt the great warm heart that was pouring out in Bedford Jail its love to God and man. Depth of feeling, vivid imagination, and absorbing sense of the reality of the whole spiritual world revealed to him in his Bible, made Bunyan a grand representative of the religious feeling of the people. In simple, direct phrase, with his heart in every line, he clothed in visible forms that code of religious faith and duty which an earnest mind, unguided by traditions, drew with its own simple strength out of the Bible. Bunyan wrote much profoundly

religious tracts, prison meditations, a book of poems-"Divine Emblems; or, Temporal Things Spiritualized, fitted for the use of Boys and Girls," and other occasional verse. The whole work of his life was like that indicated in his child's book, a spiritualizing of temporal things. Matter for him was the shadow, soul the substance; the poor man whose soul Bunyan leads by thoughts that it can follow, passes through a hard life with its dull realities all glorified. Look where he may, a man poor and troubled as himself has stamped for him God's image on some part of what he sees. As Bunyan himself rhymes:

"We change our drossy dust for gold,

From death to life we fly;

We let go shadows, and take hold
Of immortality."

The first part of "The Pilgrim's Progress from this World to that which is to Come, delivered under the similitude of a Dream, wherein is discovered the Manner of his Setting Out, his Dangerous Journey, and Safe Arrival at the Desired Country," was written in Bedford Jail, where Bunyan was a prisoner for more than eleven years, from November, 1660, to March, 1672, when a Royal declaration allowed Nonconformists (except Roman Catholics) to meet under their licensed ministers. His "Holy City" had been published in 1665; and after his release Bunyan published "a Defence of the Doctrine of Justification by Faith, a Confession of his Faith," an appeal entitled "Come and Welcome to Christ," before that "First Part of the Pilgrim's Progress" appeared in 1678, four years after the death of Milton. The allegory is realized with genius akin to that of the dramatist.

Christian, with the Burden on his back and the Book in his hand, sets out on his search for eternal life, and is at once engaged in a series of dialogues. Neighbors Obstinate and Pliable attempt to turn him back. Pliable goes a little way with him, but declines to struggle through the Slough of Despond, and gets out on the wrong side. Then Christian meets Mr. Worldly Wiseman, from the town of Carnal Policy, hard by, has a talk with him before he enters in at the Strait Gate, triumphs over Apollyon, passes through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, overtakes his towns-fellow Faithful, who tells his experiences of the journey, and