I see myself in heaven and earth at once: in heaven by my Christ, by my head, by my righteousness and life, though on earth by my body or person. Now I saw Christ Jesus was looked upon of God; and should also be looked upon by us, as that common or public person, in whom all the whole body of his elect are always to be considered and reckoned; that we fulfilled the law by him, died by him, rose from the dead by him, got the victory over sin, death, the devil, and hell, by him; when he died, we died, and so of his resurrection. Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise,' saith he, Isa. xxvi. And again, After two days he will revive us, and the third day we shall live in his sight,' Hosea vi. 2. Which is now fulfilled by the sitting down of the Son of Man on the righthand of the Majesty in the heavens, according to that to the Ephesians, He hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus,' Eph. ii. 6. "Ah! these blessed considerations and Scriptures, with many others of like nature, were in those days made to spangle in mine eye, so that I have cause to say, Praise ye the Lord God in his sanctuary; praise him in the firmament of his power; praise him for his mighty acts; praise him according to his excellent greatness,' Psalm cv. 1, 2. "Having thus in few words given you a taste of the sorrow and affliction that my soul went under, by the guilt and terror that these my wicked thoughts did lay me under and having given you also a touch of my deliverance therefrom, and of the sweet and blessed comfort that I met with afterward, which comfort dwelt about a twelvemonth with my heart, to my unspeakable admiration; I will now, God willing, before I proceed any farther, give you, in a word or two, what, as I conceive, was the cause of this temptation; and also after that, what advantage, at the last, it became unto my soul." We cannot follow Bunyan in his account of the causes of the temptation, and its ultimate advantages to his soul; but Dr. Southey must allow that in his seriously setting himself to discover these, there was at least method in his madness. And can any thing be more Scriptural or rational, than thus to inquire, "Wherefore smitest thou me ?" and to endeavour to learn the lessons of spiritual and heavenly wisdom, which the dispensation seemed calculated to afford. Bunyan's "reveries" were, it appears, highly practical; and he was at least sane enough to turn his “ symptoms" and paroxysms" to good account. One of the causes for which he thought the affliction was permitted, was, that when God had delivered him from " the temptation that went before," he had not besought him "to keep him from the temptations that were to come;" he prayed principally "for the removal of present troubles, and for fresh discoveries of God's love in Christ," but he did not sufficiently implore his heavenly Father to preserve him for the future, so that the next temptation found him unarmed. Among the spiritual advantages which he considered had resulted from the affliction, was, that " he was made continually to possess in his soul a very wonderful sense both of the blessing and glory of God, and of his beloved Son;" and also an increased knowledge of the value of Scripture, and particularly its promises, so as to repose, by faith, upon the promise, even when he could not " feel its comfort." He adds, "I never saw those heights and depths in grace, and love, and mercy, as I saw after this temptation." This was very valuable instruction to have been derived from a mere reverie. Bunyan united himself in fellowship with Mr. Gifford's little company of communicants in 1653, being about twenty-five years of age; having been baptized, by immersion, upon a profession of his faith, (Dr. Southey thinks probably in public, in the river Ouse,) as he had strongly imbibed the views of the Anti-podo-Baptists, both as to the invalidity of infant baptism, and the absolute necessity of" burial," as distinct from pouring or aspersion. He was, however, still subject to occasional relapses into his wonted spiritual depression; which Dr. Southey more flippantly than becomes the subject, expresses by saying, that " he had not yet attained that self-controul which belongs to a sane mind; for he was nearly a year pestered with strange and villanous thoughts whenever he communicated at the meeting." We have all along stated that there was much that was morbid in Bunyan, and we are not concerned to justify whatever he said or did; or to believe, as he believed, in regard to dreams, voices, or impressions; or to adopt his views either of baptism or Calvinism; but we still lament to see Dr. Southey speaking of him as a man not" sane,” and using the half-jocose expression of his being "pestered with villanous thoughts," in alluding to those wicked and blasphemous suggestions which passed through his mind, and gave him the greatest pain. Dr. Southey, however, proceeds in a better tone to add : "These however left him. When threatened with consumption at one time, he was delivered from the fear of dissolution, by faith, and the strong desire of entering upon eternal life; and in another illness, when the thought of approaching death for awhile overcame him, behold,' he says, as I was in the midst of those fears the words of the angels carrying Lazarus into Abraham's bosom, darted in upon me, as who should say, so shall it be with thee when thou dost leave this world!' This did sweetly revive my spirits, and help me to hope in God; which when I had with comfort mused on awhile, that word fell with great weight upon my mind,' O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory?' At this I became both well in body and mind at once; for my sickness did presently vanish, and I walked comfortably in my work for God again." p. xl. Dr. Southey can well appreciate such passages as these: there is a sort of moral poetry in them. He goes on to write with equal candour in the next paragraph, and we only wish he had written the whole in the same vein : "Gifford died in 1655, having drawn up during his last illness an epistle to his congregation, in a wise and tolerant and truly Christian spirit: he exhorted them to remember his advice that when any person was to be admitted a member of their community, that person should solemnly declare that union with Christ was the foundation of all saints' communion, and not merely an agreement concerning any ordinances of Christ, or any judgment or opinion about externals:' and that such new members should promise that through grace they would walk in love with the church, though there should happen any difference in judgment about other things.* Concerning separation from the church (the dying pastor pursued) about baptism, laying on of hands, anointing with oil, psalms, or any other externals, I charge every one of you respectively as ye will give an account of it to our Lord Jesus Christ who shall judge both quick and dead at his coming, that none of you be found guilty of this great evil, which some have committed, and that through a zeal for God, . . yet not according to knowledge. They have erred from the law of the love of Christ, and have made a rent in the true church, which is but one.' Mr. Ivimey in his History of the English Baptists says of Gifford, his labours were apparently confined to a narrow circle; but their effects have been very widely extended, and will not pass away when time shall be no more. We allude to his having baptized and introduced to the church the wicked Tinker of Elstow. He was doubtless the honoured Evangelist who pointed Bunyan to the Wicket Gate, by instructing him in the knowledge of the Gospel; by turning him from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God. Little did he think such a chosen vessel was sent to his house, when he opened his door to admit the poor, the depraved, and the despairing Bunyan." pp. xl, xli. Our author is displeased with Mr. Ivimey's epithet "wicked," which, as we have already seen, he thinks ought to be exchanged for "blackguard.” We need not repeat the observations in our last Number on this point, but we submit that they quite bear out Mr. Ivimey's epithet. We ought, while alluding to Mr. Ivimey, to digress for a moment, to remark that his life of Bunyan published in 1809, and re-printed in 1825, has furnished Dr. Southey with his materials to an extent which we had not ascertained when we alluded in our last Number to the Laureate's additions of original matter to the life of Bunyan. Several things which we had intended to quote as Dr. Southey's gleanings, we now trace to Mr. Ivimey; and we regret to add, that Dr. Southey has apparently with studied adroitness kept out of sight his obligations. He several times alludes to Mr. Ivimey's "History of the Baptists;" but when he quotes a passage from the same author's life of Bunyan, he omits the name, and only says "the Baptist minister who added a supplement to Bunyan's account of his own life:" so that no reader by this description could ever be led to Mr. Ivimey's book, where, though disfigured by "villanous" paper and print, he would find almost all the materials of the Laureate's splendid edition adorned with noble letter-press and beautiful wood-engravings. Dr. Southey's chief additions are some literary remarks on the Pilgrim's Progress, and a few extracts of doggerel from the margin of Bunyan's copy of Fox's Book of Martyrs still extant; the first specimen of which, as well as the fac-simile of Bunyan's large coarse signature of his name in that volume, Mr. Ivimey had already published. Our readers may be curious to see the wretched lines which marked the early poetical efforts of the author of the Pilgrim's Progress, who, indeed, in his highest flights in verse, never ascended higher than the quagmire at the foot of Parnassus. "Under the print of an Owl appearing to a Council held by Pope John at Rome. (Acts and Monuments, vol. i. 781.) Doth the owle to them apper which putt them all into a fear Will not the man and trubel crown caste the owle unto the ground. "Under the martyrdom of John Hus. (Acts and Mon. vol. i. 821.) heare is John hus that you may see uesed in deed with all cruilty. But now leet us follow and look one him Whear he is full field in deed to the brim. "Under the martyrdom of John Rogers, the Protomartyr in the Marian Persecution. (Ib. vol. iii. Í33.) It was the will of X. (Christ) that thou should die M' Rogers his body in the flames to fry. O Blessed man thou did lead this bloody way, O how wilt thou shien with X in the last day. "Under the martyrdom of Lawrence Sanders. (Ib. vol. iii. 139.) Mr Sanders is the next blessed man in deed And from all trubels he is made free. Farewell world & all hear be lo For to my dear Lord I must gooe." pp. xliii. xliv. We will now extract from Dr. Southey, some interesting literary memoranda respecting the Pilgrim's Progress-doing the author the justice to acknowledge our obligation. "The rapidity with which the editions succeeded one another, and the demand for pictures to illustrate them, are not the only proofs of the popularity which the Pilgrim's Progress obtained, before the second part was published. In the verses prefixed to that part Bunyan complains of dishonest imitators. " some have of late to counterfeit My Pilgrim, to their own, my title set; Yea others, half my name, and title too, Have stitched to their books, to make them do. Only one of these has fallen in my way, for it is by accident only that books of this perishable kind, which have no merit of their own to preserve them, are to be met with and this, though entitled 'the Second part of the Pilgrim's Progress,' has no other relation to the first than in it's title, which was probably a trick of the publishers. These interlopers may very likely have given Bunyan an additional inducement to prepare a second part himself. It appeared in 1684, with this notice on the back of the title page; 'I appoint Mr. Nathaniel Ponder, but no other to print this book, John Bunyan, January 1, 1684.' No additions or alterations were made in this part, though the author lived more than four years after its publication. "A collation of the first part, with the earliest attainable copies, has enabled me in many places to restore good old vernacular English which had been injudiciously altered, or carelessly corrupted. This has also been done in the second part: but there I had the first edition before me, and this it is evident had not been inspected either in manuscript or while passing through the press, by any person capable of correcting it. It is plain that Bunyan had willingly availed himself of such corrections in the first part; and therefore it would have been improper to have restored a certain vulgarism of diction in the second, which the editor of the folio edition had amended. Had it not been for this consideration, I should perhaps have restored his own text. For Bunyan was confident in his own powers of expression; he says thine only way Before them all, is to say out thy say In thine own native language, which no man "And he might well be confident in it. His is a homespun style, not a manufactured one and what a difference is there between its homeliness, and the flippant vulgarity of the Roger L'Estrange and Tom Brown school! If it is not a well of English undefiled, to which the poet as well as the philologist must repair, if they would drink of the living waters, it is a clear stream of current English, the vernacular speech of his age, sometimes indeed in its rusticity and coarseness, but always in its plainness and its strength. To this natural style Bunyan is in some degree beholden for his general popularity;—his language is every where level to the most ignorant reader, and to the meanest capacity: there is a homely reality about it; a nursery tale is not more intelligible, in its manner of narration, to a child. Another cause of his popularity is, that he taxes the imagination as little as the understanding. The vividness of his own, which as his history shews, sometimes could not distinguish ideal impressions from actual ones, occasioned this. He saw the things of which be was writing, as distinctly with his mind's eye as if they were indeed passing before him in a dream. And the reader, perhaps, sees them more satisfactorily to himself, because the outline only of the picture is presented to him, and the author having made no attempt to fill up the details, every reader supplies them according to the measure and scope of his own intellectual and imaginative powers. "When Bunyan's success had raised a brood of imitators, he was accused of being an imitator himself. He replied to this charge in some of his most characteristic rhymes, which were prefixed to his Holy War, as an advertisement to the reader." pp. lxxxvi-lxxxix. "But original as Bunyan believed his own work to be, and as in the main undoubtedly it is, the same allegory had often been treated before him, so often indeed that to notice all preceding works of this kind, would far exceed all reasonable limits here. Some of these may have fallen in Bunyan's way, and modified his own conception when he was not aware of any such influence. Mr. Montgomery, in his very able introductory Essay to the Pilgrim's Progress, observes, that a Poem entitled the Pilgrimage, in Whitney's Emblems, and the emblem which accompanies it, may have suggested to him the first idea of his story; indeed, he says, if he had had Whitney's picture before him he could not more accurately have copied it in words,' than in the passage where Evangelist directs Christian to the Wicket-Gate. "Another book, in which a general resemblance to the Pilgrim's Progress has been observed, is the Voyage of the Wandering Knight, of which a translation from the French of the Carmelite, Jean de Carthenay, was printed in the reign of Elizabeth, the Carmelite himself having (as Mr. Douce has kindly informed me), imitated a French poem (once very popular) composed A. D. 1310, by Guill. de Guilleville, a monk of Chanliz, and entitled the Pelerin de la Vie Humaine. There is a vague general resemblance in the subject of this work, and some occasional resemblance in the details; but the coincidences are such as the subject would naturally lead to, and the Pilgrim's Progress might have been exactly what it is, whether Bunyan had ever seen this book or not. But he had certainly seen Bernard's Isle of Man, or the Legal Proceedings in Man-shire against Sin; wherein by way of a continued allegory, the chief malefactors disturbing both Church and Commonwealth are detected and attached; with their arraignment and judicial trial, according to the laws of England.' This was a popular book in Bunyan's time, printed in a cheap form for popular sale, and to be sold by most booksellers.' There is as much wit in it as in the Pilgrim's Progress, and it is that vein of wit which Bunyan has worked with such good success. It wants the charm of story, and has nothing of that romantic interest, which holds children from sleep ;' and therefore its popularity has past away. But it is written with great spirit and ability, and for its own merit as well as for the traits of the times with which it abounds, well deserves to be re-printed. "No one who reads this little book, can doubt that it had a considerable effect upon the style of Bunyan's invention. The Bee had been shewn by this elder one where honey of a peculiar flavour might be extracted, but the new honey was of our Bee's own gathering. "Lately, however, a charge has been brought against John the Bee, of direct and knavish plagiarism. The following paragraph appeared in some London Journal, and was generally copied into the provincial newspapers; The friends of John Bunyan will be much surprised to hear that he is not the author of the Pilgrim's Progress, but the mere translator. It is, however, an act of plagiarism, to publish it in such a way as to mislead his readers; but it is never too late to call things by their right names. The truth is, that the work was even published in French, Spanish, and Dutch, besides other languages, before John Bunyan saw it; and we have ourselves seen a copy in the Dutch language, with numerous plates, printed long previous to Bunyan's time.' It is very difficult,' says Mr. Montgomery, to imagine for what purpose such a falsehood (if it be one) should be framed; or how such a fact (if it be a fact) could have been so long concealed; or when declared thus publicly, why it should never have been established by the production of this Dutch copy, with its numerous plates. Be this as it may, till the story is authenticated, it must be regarded as utterly unworthy of credit.' "I also, upon reading this notable paragraph in a newspaper, felt as Montgomery had done, and as 'it is never too soon to call things by their right names,' bestowed upon it at once its proper qualification. It would indeed be as impossible for me to believe that Bunyan did not write the Pilgrim's Progress, as that Porson did write a certain copy of verses entitled the Devil's Thoughts. There must have been a grievous want of common sense in the person who wrote the paragraph, to suppose that such a plagiarism could have escaped detection till he discovered it; Bunyan's book having been translated into those languages, (and current in them) in one of which, according to him, the original, and in the others, earlier versions of that original than the English Pilgrim's Progress' were existing! But there must have been a more grievous want of fidelity in his assertions. If he had been able to read the book which he saw, this gross accusation could never have been brought against John Bunyan. "The book in question (to which without reference to this supposed plagiarism, Mr. Douce with his wonted knowledge had previously directed my attention), I have had an opportunity of perusing, through the kindness of its possessor, Mr. Offor. A person looking (like Bunyan's accuser) at the prints, and not understanding the language in which the book is written, might have supposed that hints had been taken from them for the adventures at the Slough of Despond, and at Vanity Fair; but that the Pilgrim's Progress was not a translation from the work he must have known, for the Pilgrims in the prints are women; and it required no knowledge of Dutch to perceive that the book is written not as a narrative, but in a series of dialogues." pp. xc-xciv. "The Pilgrim's Progress has more than once been done into verse,' but I have seen only one version, and that of only the First Part. It was printed by R. Tookey, and to be sold by the booksellers of London and Westminster; but if there be a date to this version, it has been torn off with the corner of the title-page, from this well thumbed and well worn copy, for the use of which (as of other rare books that have been most useful on the present occasion) I am obliged to Mr. Alexander Chalmers. The versification is in the lowest Witherish strain, one degree only above Bunyan's own; yet here and there with indications of more power than the writer has thought proper to put forth. In general the version keeps close to the original: In one place a stroke of satire is put into Apollyon's mouth, against the occasional conformists Come go with me occasionally back, Rather than a preferment lose or lack. "And after the Pilgrims have crost the river, this singular illustration occursThen on all sides the heavenly hosts enclose, As through the upper regions all arose ; With mighty shouts and louder harmonies, As if they had drawn up the curtain of the skies. "Though the story certainly is not improved by versifying it, it is less injured than might have been supposed in the process; and perhaps most readers would read it with as much interest in the one dress as in the other. "A stranger experiment was tried upon the Pilgrim's Progress, in translating it into other words, altering the names, and publishing it under the title of the Progress of the Pilgrim, without any intimation that this version is not an original work. Evangelist is here called Good-news; Worldly Wiseman, Mr. Politic Worldly; Legality, Mr. Law-do; the Interpreter, Director; the Palace Beautiful, Graces Hall; Vanity town is Mundus; the Giant, is Giant Desperation of Diffident Castle, and the prisoners released from it, instead of Mr. Despondency and his daughter Much-afraid, are 'one Much-cast-down, and his kinsman Almost Overcome.' This would appear to have been merely the device of some knavish bookseller for evading the laws which protect literary property; but the person employed in disguising the stolen goods must have been a Roman Catholic, for he has omitted all mention of Giant Pope, and Fidelius suffers Martyrdom by being hanged, drawn, and quartered. The dialogues are much curtailed, and the book, as might be expected, very much worsened throughout; except that better verses are inserted. "Bunyan could little have supposed that his book would ever be adapted for sale among the Romanists. Whether this was done in the earliest French translation I do not know; but in the second there is no Giant Pope; and lest the circumstances of the author should operate unfavourably for the reception of his work, he is designated as un Ministre Anglois, nommé Jean Bunian, Pasteur d'une Eglise dans la Ville de Bedfort en Angleterre. This contains only the first part, but promises the second, should it be well received. The first part, under the title of le Pelerinage d'un nommé Chrétien, forms one of the volumes of the Petite Bibliotheque du Catholique, and bears in the title-page a glorified head of the Virgin. A Portugueze translation (of the first part also) and in like manner cut down to the opinions of the public for which it was designed, was published in 1782. Indeed I believe there is |