narrative. We have not the least doubt that Bunyan had in view some stout old Greatheart of Naseby and Worcester, who prayed with his men before he drilled them, who knew the spiritual state of every dragoon in his troop, and who, with the praises of God in his mouth, and a twoedged sword in his hand, had turned to flight on many fields of battle the swearing, drunken bravoes of Rupert and Lunsford. Every age produces such men as By-ends. But the middle of the seventeenth century was eminently prolific of such men. Mr Southey thinks that the satire was aimed at some particular individual, and this seems by no means improbable. At all events, Bunyan must have known many of those hypocrites who followed religion only when religion walked in silver slippers, when the sun shone, and when the people applauded. Indeed he might have easily found all the kindred of By-ends among the public men of his time. He might have found among the peers my Lord Turnabout, my Lord Timeserver, and my Lord Fairspeech; in the House of Commons, Mr Smoothman, Mr Anything, and Mr Facing-both-ways; nor would "the parson of the parish, Mr Twotongues," have been wanting. The town of Bedford probably contained more than one politician who, after contriving to raise an estate by seeking the Lord during the reign of the saints, contrived to keep what he had got by persecuting the saints during the reign of the strumpets; and more than one priest who, during repeated changes in the discipline and doctrines of the Church, had remained constant to nothing but his benefice. One of the most remarkable passages in the "Pilgrim's Progress" is that in which the proceedings against Faithful are described. It is impossible to doubt that Bunyan intended to satirise the mode in which state trials were conducted under Charles II. The licence given to the witnesses for the prosecution, the shameless partiality and ferocious insolence of the judge, the precipitancy and the blind rancour of the jury, remind us of those odious mummeries which, from the Restoration to the Revolution, were merely forms preliminary to hanging, drawing, and quartering. Lord Hategood performs the office of counsel for the prisoners as well as Scroggs himself could have performed it. "JUDGE. Thou runagate, heretic, and traitor, hast thou heard what these honest gentlemen have witnessed against thee? "FAITHFUL. May I speak a few words in my own defence? "JUDGE. Sirrah, sirrah! thou deservest to live no longer, but to be slain immediately upon the place; yet, that all men may see our gentleness to thee, let us hear what thou, vile runagate, hast to say." No person who knows the state trials can be at a loss for parallel cases. Indeed, write what Bunyan would, the baseness and cruelty of the lawyers of those times "sinned up to it still," and even went beyond it. The imaginary trial of Faithful, before a jury composed of personified vices, was just and merciful when compared with the real trial of Lady Alice Lisle before that tribunal where all the vices sat in the person of Jefferies. The style of Bunyan is delightful to every reader, and invaluable as a study to every person who wishes to obtain a wide command over the English language. The vocabulary is the vocabulary of the common people. There is not an expression, if we except a few technical terms of theology, which would puzzle the rudest peasant. We have observed several pages which do not contain a single word of more than two syllables. Yet no writer has said more exactly what he meant to say. For magnificence, for pathos, for vehement exhortation, for subtle disquisition, for every purpose of the poet, the orator, and the divine, this homely dialect-the dialect of plain working men—was perfectly sufficient. There is no book in our literature on which we would so readily stake the fame of the old unpolluted English language-no book which shows so well how rich that language is in its own proper wealth, and how little it has been improved by all that it has borrowed. Cowper said, forty or fifty years ago, that he dared not name John Bunyan in his verse, for fear of moving a sneer. To our refined forefathers, we suppose, Lord Roscommon's "Essay on Translated Verse," and the Duke of Bucking hamshire's "Essay on Poetry," appeared to be compositions infinitely superior to the allegory of the preaching tinker. We live in better times; and we are not afraid to say that, though there were many clever men in England during the latter half of the seventeenth century, there were only two great creative minds. One of those minds produced the "Paradise Lost," the other the "Pilgrim's Progress." ALEXANDER SMITH. BORN 1829: DIED 1867. (From "Dreamthorp," a book of essays written in the country.) BOOKS AND GARDENS. in the passions; but some others from native instinct, as a duckling seeks water. I have MOST men seek solitude from wounded vanity, taken to my solitude, such as it is, from an infrom disappointed ambition, from a miscarriage | dolent turn of mind; and this solitude I sweeten My by an imaginative sympathy which recreates the past for me-the past of the world, as well as the past which belongs to me as an individual-and which makes me independent of the passing moment. I see every one struggling after the unattainable, but I struggle not, and so spare myself the pangs of disappointment and disgust. I have no ventures at sea, and, consequently, do not fear the arrival of evil tidings. I have no desire to act any prominent part in the world, but I am devoured by an unappeasable curiosity as to the men who do act. I am not an actor; I am a spectator only. sole occupation is sight-seeing. In a certain imperial idleness, I amuse myself with the world. Ambition! What do I care for ambition? The oyster with much pain produces its pearl. I take the pearl. Why should I produce one after this miserable, painful fashion? It would be but a flawed one at best. These pearls I can pick up by the dozen. The production of them is going on all around me, and there will be a nice crop for the solitary man of the next century. Look at a certain silent emperor, for instance; a hundred years hence his pearl will be handed about from hand to hand; will be curiously scrutinised and valued; will be set in its place in the world's cabinet. I confess I should like to see the completion of that filmy orb. Will it be pure in colour? Will its purity be marred by an ominous bloody streak? Of this I am certain, that in the cabinet in which the world keeps these peculiar treasures, no one will be looked at more frequently, or will provoke a greater variety of opinions as to its intrinsic worth. Why should I be ambitious? Shall I write verses? I am not likely to surpass Mr Tennyson or Mr Browning in that walk. Shall I be a musician? The black bird singing this moment somewhere in my garden shrubbery puts me to instant shame. Shall I paint? The intensest scarlet on an artist's palette is but ochre to that I saw this morning at sunrise. No, no; let me enjoy Mr Tennyson's verse, and the blackbird's song, and the colours of sunrise, but do not let me emulate them. I am happier as it is. I do not need to make history-there are plenty of people willing to save me trouble on that score. The cook makes the dinner, the guests eat it, and the last, not without reason, is considered the happier man. In my garden I spend my days; in my library I spend my nights. My interests are divided between my geraniums and my books. With the flower I am in the present; with the book I am in the past. I go into my library, and all history unrolls before me. I breathe the morning air of the world while the scent of Eden's roses yet lingered in it, while it vibrated only to the world's first brood of nightingales, and to the laugh of Eve. I see the Pyramids building; I hear the shoutings of the armies of Alexander; I feel the ground shake beneath the march of Cambyses. I sit as in a theatre-the stage is time, the play is the play of the world. What a spectacle it is! What kingly pomp, what processions file past, what cities burn to heaven, what crowds of captives are dragged at the chariot-wheels of conquerors! I hear or cry "Bravo" when the great actors come on shaking the stage. I am a Roman emperor when I look at a Roman coin. I lift Homer, and I shout with Achilles in the trenches. The silence of the unpeopled Syrian plains, the outcomings and ingoings of the patriarchs, Abraham and Ishmael, Isaac in the fields at even-tide, Rebekah at the well, Jacob's guile, Esau's face reddened by desert sun-heat, Joseph's splendid funeral procession-all these things I find within the boards of my Old Testament. What a silence in those old books as of a half-peopled world-what bleating of flocks-what green pastoral rest-what indubitable human existence! Across brawling centuries of blood and war, I hear the bleating of Abraham's flocks, the tinkling of the bells of Rebekah's camels. Oh, men and women, so far separated yet so near, so strange yet so well-known, by what miraculous power do I know ye all? Books are the true Elysian fields where the spirits of the dead converse, and into these fields a mortal may venture unappalled. What king's court can boast such company? What school of philosophy such wisdom? The wit of the ancient world is glancing and flashing there. There is Pan's pipe, there are the songs of Apollo. Seated in my library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural. They are not collections of printed pages, they are ghosts. I take one down and it speaks with me in a tongue not now heard on earth, and of men and things of which it alone possesses knowledge. I call myself a solitary, but sometimes I think I misapply the term. No man sees more company than I do. I travel with mightier cohorts around me than ever did Timour or Genghis Khan on their fiery marches. I am a sovereign in my library, but it is the dead, not the living that attend my levees. The house I dwell in stands apart from the little town, and relates itself to the houses as I do to the inhabitants. It sees everything, but is itself unseen, or, at all events, unregarded. My study window looks down upon Dreamthorp like a meditative eye. Without meaning it, I feel I am a spy on the ongoings of the quiet place. Around my house there is an oldfashioned rambling garden, with close-shaven grassy plots, and fantastically-clipped yews, which have gathered their darkness from a hundred summers and winters; and sun-dials, in which the sun is constantly telling bis age; and statues, green with neglect and the stains of the weather. The garden I love more than any place on earth; it is a better study than the room inside the house which is dignified by that name. I like to pace its gravelled walks, to sit in the moss-house, which is warm and cozy as a bird's nest, and wherein twilight dwells at noonday; to enjoy the feast of colour spread for me in the curiously-shaped floral spaces. My garden, with its silence and the pulses of fragrance that come and go on the airy undulations, affects me like sweet music. Care stops at the gates, and gazes at me wistfully through the bars. Among my flowers and trees Nature takes me into her own hands, and I breathe freely as the first man. It is curious, pathetic almost, I sometimes think, how deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening. The sickly seamstress in the narrow city lane tends her box of sicklier mignonette. The retired merchant is as fond of tulips as ever was Dutchman during the famous mania. The author finds a garden the best place to think out his thought. In the disabled statesman every restless throb of regret or ambition is stilled when he looks upon his blossomed appletrees. Is the fancy too far brought, that this love for gardens is a reminiscence haunting the race of that remote time in the world's dawn when but two persons existed-a gardener named Adam, and a gardener's wife called Eve? When I walk out of my house into my garden I walk out of my habitual self, my everyday thoughts, my customariness of joy or sorrow by which I recognise and assure myself of my own identity. These I leave behind me for a time as the bather leaves his garments on the beach. This piece of garden-ground, in extent barely a square acre, is a kingdom with its own interests, annals, and incidents. Something is always happening in it. To-day is always different from yesterday. This spring a chaffinch built a nest in one of my yew-trees. The particular yew which the bird did me the honour to select had been clipped long ago into a similitude of Adam, and, in fact, went by his name. The resemblance to a human figure was, of course, remote, but the intention was evident. In the black shock head of our first parent did the birds establish their habitation. A prettier, rounder, more comfortable nest I never saw, and His own children, and the children he happens many a wild swing it got when Adam bent his to meet on the country road, a man regards with back, and bobbed and shook his head when the quite different eyes. The strange, sunburnt bitter east wind was blowing. The nest inter- brats returning from a primrose-hunt and laden ested me, and I visited it every day from the with floral spoils, may be as healthy-looking, as time that the first stained turquoise sphere was pretty, as well-behaved, as sweet-tempered, as laid in the warm lining of moss and horsehair, neatly-dressed as those that bear his nametill, when I chirped, four red hungry throats, may be in every respect as worthy of love and eager for worm or slug, opened out of a confused admiration, but then they have the misfortune mass of feathery down. What a hungry brood not to belong to him. That little fact makes a it was, to be sure, and how often father and great difference. He knows nothing about them mother were put to it to provide them susten--his acquaintance with them is born and dead ance! I went but the other day to have a peep, and, behold, brood and parent-birds were gone, the nest was empty, Adam's visitors had de parted. In the corners of my bedroom window I have a couple of swallows' nests, and nothing can be pleasanter in these summer mornings than to lie in a kind of half-dream, conscious all the time of the chatterings and endearments of the man-loving creatures. They are beautifully restless, and are continually darting around their nests in the window-corners. All at once there is a great twittering and noise; something of moment has been witnessed, something of importance has occurred in swallow-world, perhaps a fly of unusual size or savour has been bolted. Clinging with their feet, and with heads turned charmingly aside, they chatter away with voluble sweetness, then with a gleam of silver they are gone, and in a trice one is poising itself in the wind above my tree-tops, while the other dips her wing as she darts after a fly through the arches of the bridge which lets the slow stream down to the sea. I go to the southern wall, against which I have trained my fruit-trees, and find it a sheet of white and vermeil blossom, and as I know it by heart, 1 can notice what changes take place on it day by day, what later clumps of buds have burst into colour and odour. What beauty in that blooming wall-the wedding-presents of a princess ranged for admiration would not please me half so much; what delicate colouring, what fragrance the thievish winds steal from it without making it one odour the poorer, with what a complacent hum the bee goes past. My chaffinch's nest, my swallows-twittering but a few months ago around the kraal of the Hottentot, or chasing flies around the six solitary pillars o, Baalbec-with their nests in the corners of my bedroom windows, my long-armed fruit-trees flowering against my sunny wall, are not mighty pleasures, but then they are my own, and I have not to go in search of them. And so, like a wise man, I am content with what I have, and make it richer by my fancy, which is as cheap as sunlight, and gilds objects quite as prettily. It is the coins in my own pocket, not the coins in the pockets of my neighbour, that are of use to me. Discontent has never a doit in her purse, and envy is the most poverty-stricken of the passions. in a moment. I like my garden better than any other garden for the same reason. It is my own. And ownership in such a matter implies a great |