The Life of John Bunyan | Page 6

of gipsy
descent, which was not entirely rejected by Sir Walter Scott, and which
has more recently received elaborate support from writers on the other
side of the Atlantic, may be pronounced absolutely baseless. Even if
Bunyan's inquiry of his father "whether the family was of Israelitish
descent or no," which has been so strangely pressed into the service of

the theory, could be supposed to have anything to do with the matter,
the decided negative with which his question was met - "he told me,
'No, we were not'" - would, one would have thought, have settled the
point. But some fictions die hard. However low the family had sunk, so
that in his own words, "his father's house was of that rank that is
meanest and most despised of all the families in the land," "of a low
and inconsiderable generation," the name, as we have seen, was one of
long standing in Bunyan's native county, and had once taken far higher
rank in it. And his parents, though poor, were evidently worthy people,
of good repute among their village neighbours. Bunyan seems to be
describing his own father and his wandering life when he speaks of "an
honest poor labouring man, who, like Adam unparadised, had all the
world to get his bread in, and was very careful to maintain his family."
He and his wife were also careful with a higher care that their children
should be properly educated. "Notwithstanding the meanness and
inconsiderableness of my parents," writes Bunyan, "it pleased God to
put it into their hearts to put me to school, to learn both to read and
write." If we accept the evidence of the "Scriptural Poems," published
for the first time twelve years after his death, the genuineness of which,
though questioned by Dr. Brown, there seems no sufficient reason to
doubt, the little education he had was "gained in a grammar school."
This would have been that founded by Sir William Harpur in Queen
Mary's reign in the neighbouring town of Bedford. Thither we may
picture the little lad trudging day by day along the mile and a half of
footpath and road from his father's cottage by the brookside, often, no
doubt, wet and miry enough, not, as he says, to "go to school to
Aristotle or Plato," but to be taught "according to the rate of other poor
men's children." The Bedford school-master about this time, William
Barnes by name, was a negligent sot, charged with "night- walking"
and haunting "taverns and alehouses," and other evil practices, as well
as with treating the poor boys "when present" with a cruelty which
must have made them wish that his absences, long as they were, had
been more protracted. Whether this man was his master or no, it was
little that Bunyan learnt at school, and that little he confesses with
shame he soon lost "almost utterly." He was before long called home to
help his father at the Harrowden forge, where he says he was "brought
up in a very mean condition among a company of poor countrymen."

Here, with but little to elevate or refine his character, the boy
contracted many bad habits, and grew up what Coleridge somewhat too
strongly calls "a bitter blackguard." According to his own remorseful
confession, he was "filled with all unrighteousness," having "from a
child" in his "tender years," "but few equals both for cursing, swearing,
lying and blaspheming the holy name of God." Sins of this kind he
declares became "a second nature to him;" he "delighted in all
transgression against the law of God," and as he advanced in his teens
he became a "notorious sinbreeder," the "very ringleader," he says, of
the village lads "in all manner of vice and ungodliness." But the
unsparing condemnation passed by Bunyan, after his conversion, on his
former self, must not mislead us into supposing him ever, either as boy
or man, to have lived a vicious life. "The wickedness of the tinker,"
writes Southey, "has been greatly overrated, and it is taking the
language of self-accusation too literally to pronounce of John Bunyan
that he was at any time depraved." The justice of this verdict of
acquittal is fully accepted by Coleridge. "Bunyan," he says, "was never
in our received sense of the word 'wicked.' He was chaste, sober, and
honest." He hints at youthful escapades, such, perhaps, as
orchard-robbing, or when a little older, poaching, and the like, which
might have brought him under "the stroke of the laws," and put him to
"open shame before the face of the world." But he confesses to no
crime or profligate habit. We have no reason to suppose that he was
ever drunk, and we have his own most solemn declaration that he was
never guilty of