After he was released from his imprisonment his friends built him. a meeting-house in Bedford. Thousands crowded to hear him. He said, that when he preached, he felt as if the angel of God stood behind to cheer him on; still, sometimes he preached with fear and trembling.

Bunyan lived in a persecuting age. It was then a crime for one out of the Church of England to preach; a punishable crime, too, not to attend her stated services. Bunyan's conscience forbade him to do this; it constrained him to preach. "Woe is me, if I preach not the Gospel." So the man felt who wrote Pilgrim's Progress. Such a conscience, at that time, was a great inconvenience in England. Dressed like a carter, in a coarse frock, with a whip in his hand, he many a time stole by a back way, into a religious meet

ing secretly held. It brought John Bunyan to much grief; brought him twelve and a half years to Bedford jail; and brought the immortal Pilgrim's Progress to the world. The paper calling for his arrest, says: "That John Bunyan, of the town of Bedford, laborer, had devilishly and perniciously abstained from coming to Church to hear divine service; and was a common upholder of several unlawful meetings and conventicles, to the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of this kingdom, contrary to the laws of our sovereign lord, the king."

At thirty-two years of age he was imprisoned in the Bedford jail, after he had been a member of the Church for five years. The twelve and a half years he spent in his gloomy cell, proved a valuable schooling for him. They were years of sore trial. Occasionally, the jailor would permit his family and some friends to see him. Their destitute condition distressed him greatly. Especially did his heart bleed for his eldest daughter, who was blind. Stop thy ranting preaching, and worship according to the Church of England, and thou shalt have thy liberty." Thus spoke the government. But his conscience allowed him to do neither. To support his family, he learned to make tagged thread lace, during the intervals of his prison tasks. With these scanty earnings they lived in tolerable comfort. He read much during his chance leisure moments; read the Bible and Fox's Book of Martyrs. These were the only books he had. No one had ever dreamed that the unlettered tinker would attempt, much less succeed, to write a useful book. But a book he wrote; wrote it in Bedford jail, and one of the few works that will live forever. In jail he had time to reflect and form habits of close, correct thinking. Joseph in his Egyptian prison, Moses in exile at Horeb, Luther in the Wartburg prison, translating the Bible, all show how God sometimes allows His servants to be shut out from the world, in order to train them for some great work or mission.

Had not Bunyan been locked into Bedford jail, the world would never have had a Pilgrim's Progress. Thus God makes the wrath of man to praise Him. Many an humble Christian, for other's good, heroically crucifies his dearest temporal interests.

He wrote the book in a quaint, rude style. Much, indeed, had the printers to correct in his spelling. For many years, the learned refused to notice or praise the Pilgrim's Progress. The ignorant, or common people were charmed by it. In twenty-five years it passed through more than fifty editions. And since then, it has been translated into every language of the civilized world.

The last year of his jail life he was elected pastor of a church in Bedford. In 1782 he was released from prison. During the remainder of his life he labored with undiminished ardor; going from place to place preaching to the masses in their own rude, unpolished tongue. The persecuted he relieved wherever he could. And a very gifted peacemaker he was, reconciling the enmities among God's people. In very bad weather he made a journey to Reading, in Berkshire, to heal a breach between a certain father and his son. He succeeded in his mission of love, but thereby caught a disease, which soon thereafter led to his death. He died at sixty years of age, and was a minister of the Gospel for about thirty-two. At Bunhill Fields, England, rest the remains of the sainted author of the Pilgrim's Progress. He was married twice, and had four children. His second wife survived him four years. We are told, "in person, Bunyan was tall and broad-set, though not corpulent; he had a ruddy complexion, with sparkling eyes, and hair inclining to red, but in his old age, sprinkled with gray. His whole appearance was plain, and his dress always simple and unaffected. He published sixty tracts, which equalled the number of years he lived. His countenance was rather stern, and his manner rough; yet he was very mild, modest and affable in his behavior. He was backward to speak much, except on particular occasions, and remarkably averse to boasting; ready to submit to the judgment of others and disposed to forgive injuries, to follow peace with all men, and to employ himself as a peacemaker; yet he was steady to his principles, and bold in reproving sin, without respect to persons."

Little did our friend expect, that his well-meant suggestion about the Pilgrim's Progress, would become the occasion of inflicting upon the readers of the "Guardian" a sketch of its author. But his life has a moral no less than his book, and we advise our readers to study and improve both.

ENVY deserves pity more than anger, for it hurts nobody so much as itself.

THE FAMILY BEAR.

A DECLAMATION FOR A GIRL.

The tale I am now about to tell,
Is a tale of something that once befell
The son of a man who went to dwell

Away from his friends and neighbors
He didn't exactly go to the dogs,
He built him a cabin of mud and logs,
With nobody near him but wolves and frogs,
To make remarks on his labors.

A stern and upright man was he;
His wife was comely and fair to see:
His sons were nine and his daughters three,
Like the Muses and the Graces;

But lest their beauty should prove a snare,
He gave them the coarsest clothes to wear:
He taught them 'twas folly to dress their hair,
And he never would have a mirror there

To make them proud of their faces.

But once on a time, as the stories say,
When he went to the city his tax to pay,
And lay in a store for many a day,

Of the family salt and spices:

In the top of his trunk, with the greatest care, He placed a mirror, shining and square,

And bade the family all beware,

He would have no meddling fingers there,
For he wouldn't encourage their vices.

No doubt it was evil blood that ran
Clear back to the time the world began,
When Eve, our mother, first tempted man:
But this there was no denying;
In spite of his threat, it came to pass
That the youngest son of his love, alas!
Peeped into the trunk, and into the glass,
Then fell to shrieking and crying!

For out of the trunk looked up to him
A grimy face with a senseless grin,
And shaggy locks in such woful trim;
'Twas a very natural error.

With people great and small, the course of true love does not usually run smooth. But rough or smooth, the lesson always hath a moral. Poor Xantippe has been the worst abused spouse the world has had for two thousand years. Her violent temper, we are told, made her a scourge to her wise husband. And rarely are people as well mated as were Mr. and Mrs. Socrates. For he owned that he had married and endured her for self-discipline. And if a man needs any schooling of that sort, what lady could be a more successful connubial disciplinarian than Xantippe? One day she scolded him violently as she stood at her open window, and sealed the lesson by dashing a pail of water on him. "Just as I expected," he sweetly replied, "after the thunder comes the shower." The younger Pliny praises his amiable wife in language as touching as it is sincere. He says: "Her affection for me has given her a turn to books: her passion will increase with our days; for it is not my youth or my person, which time gradually impairs, but my reputation and my glory, of which she is enamored."

A long list of Artists and Philosophers never married-from choice. When some one asked Michael Angelo why he did not marry, he replied: "I have espoused my Art; and it occasions me sufficient domestic cares, for my works shall be my children. What would Bartholomew Ghiberti have been had he not made the gates

of St. John? His children consumed his fortune, but his gates, worthy to be the gates of Paradise remain." A young painter, who had just been married, told Sir Joshua Reynolds, that he was preparing to pursue his studies in Italy. "Married!" exclaimed Sir Joshua, "then you are ruined as an artist!" Newton, Locke, Leibnitz, Bayle, Hobbes, Hume, Gibbon and Anna Smith, for some cause or other were never married.

Poets have ever been peculiarly susceptible of the tender passion. "Never durst poet touch a pen to write,

Until his ink were tempered with love's sighs."

Love has given inspiration to their grandest poetry; it has been the burden of their sweetest songs. Yet much domestic unhappiness have they ever had. And chiefly because the true poet deals in ideals, and he is satisfied with nothing short of an ideal wife. And ideals are not earth-born, but heaven-born beings. In heaven only are faultless, perfect beings to be found. On earth dwell none but the imperfect; and, what is worse, we ourselves belong to that class.

Dante's great soul received its first inspiring spell from the sight of Beatrice. She became the wife of another, but her image followed him like a guardian angel, in all his ways. He married the daughter of a noble family, but a woman of an ignoble spirit. The grand poet could neither soften nor control her temper. When driven into exile, she never cared to see him again.

Petrarch's Laura exercised a similar influence on his life and writings. He seldom saw her, but through his ardent, unrequited love was threatened with a serious disease. By traveling he recovered his health. But a chance sight of Laura brought on his former trouble. Her death plunged him into inconsolable sorrow. In his copy of Virgil, he wrote the following on the margin of a page:

"Laura, illustrious for her virtues, and for a long time celebrated in my verses, for the first time appeared to my eyes on the 6th of April, 1327, in the church of St. Clara, at the first hour of the day. I was then in my youth. In the same city, and at the same hour, in the year 1348, this luminary disappeared from our world. I was then at Verona, ignorant of my wretched situation. Her chaste and beautiful body was buried the same day, after Vespers, in the church of the Cordeliers. Her soul returned to its native mansion in heaven. I have written this with a pleasure, mixed with bitterness, to retrace the melancholy remembrance of my great loss. This loss convinces me that I have nothing now left worth living for, since the strongest chord of my life is broken. By the grace of God, I shall easily renounce a world where my hopes have been vain and perishing."