Select Essays of Macaulay Milton Bunyan Johnson Goldsmith Madame D'arblay Author:Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1891 Original Publisher: Allyn and Bacon Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Literary Criticism / Women Authors Literary Criticism / Poetry Poetry / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the... more » original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: JOHN BUNYAN. (MAT, 1854.) John Bunyan, the most popular religious writer in the English language, was born at Elstow, about a mile from Bedford, in the year 1628. He may be said to have been born a tinker. The tinkers then formed a hereditary caste, which was held in no high estimation. They were generally vagrants and pilferers, and were often confounded with the gypsies, whom in truth they nearly resembled. Bun- yan's father was more respectable than most of the tribe. He had a fixed residence, and was able to send his son to a village school where reading and writing were taught. The years of John's boyhood were those during which the Puritan spirit was in the highest vigor all over England ; and nowhere had that spirit more influence than in Bedfordshire. It is not wonderful, therefore, that a lad to whom nature had given a powerful imagination, and sensibility which amounted to a disease, should have been early haunted by religious terrors. Before he was ten, his sports were interrupted by fits of remorse and despair; and his sleep was disturbed by dreams of fiends trying to fly away with him. As he grew older, his mental conflicts became still more violent. The strong language in which he described them has strangely misled all his biographers except Mr. Southey. It has long been an ordinary practice with pious writers to cite Bunyan as an instance of the supernatural power of div...« less