17. JOHN BUNYAN (+1628-1688+), one of the most popular of our prose-writers, was born at Elstow, in Bedfordshire, in the year 1628-- just three years before the birth of Dryden. He served, when a young man, with the Parliamentary forces, and was present at the siege of Leicester. At the Restoration, he was apprehended for preaching, in disobedience to the Conventicle Act, “was had home to prison, and there lay complete twelve years.” Here he supported himself and his family by making tagged laces and other small-wares; and here, too, he wrote the immortal +Pilgrim’s Progress+. After his release, he became pastor of the Baptist congregation at Bedford. He had a great power of bringing persons who had quarrelled together again; and he was so popular among those who knew him, that he was generally spoken of as “Bishop Bunyan.” On a journey, undertaken to reconcile an estranged father and a rebellious son, he caught a severe cold, and died of fever in London, in the year 1688. Every one has read, or will read, the +Pilgrim’s Progress+; and it may be said, without exaggeration, that to him who has not read the book, a large part of English life and history is dumb and unintelligible. Bunyan has been called the “Spenser of the people,” and “the greatest master of allegory that ever lived.” His power of imagination is something wonderful; and his simple, homely, and vigorous style makes everything so real, that we seem to be reading a narrative of everyday events and conversations. His vocabulary is not, as Macaulay said, “the vocabulary of the common people;” rather should we say that his English is the English of the Bible and of the best religious writers. His style is, almost everywhere, simple, homely, earnest, and vernacular-- without being vulgar. Bunyan’s books have, along with Shakespeare and Tyndale’s works, been among the chief supports of an idiomatic, nervous, and simple English.