Old Portraits and Modern Sketches; Personal Sketches and Tributes; Historical Papers | Page 2

these old pages seems not so
much that of a denizen of the world in which we live, as of a soul at the
last solemn confessional. Shorn of all ornament, simple and direct as
the contrition and prayer of childhood, when for the first time the
Spectre of Sin stands by its bedside, the style is that of a man dead to
self-gratification, careless of the world's opinion, and only desirous to
convey to others, in all truthfulness and sincerity, the lesson of his
inward trials, temptations, sins, weaknesses, and dangers; and to give

glory to Him who had mercifully led him through all, and enabled him,
like his own Pilgrim, to leave behind the Valley of the Shadow of
Death, the snares of the Enchanted Ground, and the terrors of Doubting
Castle, and to reach the land of Beulah, where the air was sweet and
pleasant, and the birds sang and the flowers sprang up around him, and
the Shining Ones walked in the brightness of the not distant Heaven. In
the introductory pages he says "he could have dipped into a style higher
than this in which I have discoursed, and could have adorned all things
more than here I have seemed to do; but I dared not. God did not play
in tempting me; neither did I play when I sunk, as it were, into a
bottomless pit, when the pangs of hell took hold on me; wherefore, I
may not play in relating of them, but be plain and simple, and lay down
the thing as it was."
This book, as well as Pilgrim's Progress, was written in Bedford prison,
and was designed especially for the comfort and edification of his
"children, whom God had counted him worthy to beget in faith by his
ministry." In his introduction he tells them, that, although taken from
them, and tied up, "sticking, as it were, between the teeth of the lions of
the wilderness," he once again, as before, from the top of Shemer and
Hermon, so now, from the lion's den and the mountain of leopards,
would look after then with fatherly care and desires for their everlasting
welfare. "If," said he, "you have sinned against light; if you are tempted
to blaspheme; if you are drowned in despair; if you think God fights
against you; or if Heaven is hidden from your eyes, remember it was so
with your father. But out of all the Lord delivered me."
He gives no dates; be affords scarcely a clue to his localities; of the
man, as he worked, and ate, and drank, and lodged, of his neighbors
and contemporaries, of all he saw and heard of the world about him, we
have only an occasional glimpse, here and there, in his narrative. It is
the story of his inward life only that he relates. What had time and
place to do with one who trembled always with the awful
consciousness of an immortal nature, and about whom fell alternately
the shadows of hell and the splendors of heaven? We gather, indeed,
from his record, that he was not an idle on-looker in the time of
England's great struggle for freedom, but a soldier of the Parliament, in

his young years, among the praying sworders and psalm-singing
pikemen, the Greathearts and Holdfasts whom he has immortalized in
his allegory; but the only allusion which he makes to this portion of his
experience is by way of illustration of the goodness of God in
preserving him on occasions of peril.
He was born at Elstow, in Bedfordshire, in 1628; and, to use his own
words, his "father's house was of that rank which is the meanest and
most despised of all the families of the land." His father was a tinker,
and the son followed the same calling, which necessarily brought him
into association with the lowest and most depraved classes of English
society. The estimation in which the tinker and his occupation were
held, in the seventeenth century, may be learned from the quaint and
humorous description of Sir Thomas Overbury. "The tinker," saith he,
"is a movable, for he hath no abiding in one place; he seems to be
devout, for his life is a continual pilgrimage, and sometimes, in
humility, goes barefoot, therein making necessity a virtue; he is a
gallant, for he carries all his wealth upon his back; or a philosopher, for
he bears all his substance with him. He is always furnished with a song,
to which his hammer, keeping tune, proves that he was the first founder
of the kettle- drum; where the best ale is, there stands his music most
upon crotchets. The companion of his travel is some foul, sun-burnt
quean, that, since the terrible statute, has recanted gypsyism, and is
turned