I think he did never wear a wig. Buckingham, who courted almost all orders of men, would not have honored him with a nod of recognition; nor would Bishop Burnet. I think even the amiable Dr. Tillotson, or the very liberal Dr. South, would have jostled away from him in a crowd, rather than toward him. Yet he was more pious than they; had more humor than Buckingham; and for imaginative power would outrank every man living in that day, unless we except the blind old poet Milton. You will guess easily the name I have in mind: it is John Bunyan.[83] Not a great name then; so vulgar a one indeed that--a good many years later--the amiable poet Cowper spoke of it charily. But it is known now and honored wherever English is spoken. He was born at Elstow, a mile away from Bedford, amid fat green meadows, beside which in early May long lines of hawthorn hedges are all abloom. You will go straight through that pleasant country in passing from Liverpool to London, if you take, as I counsel you to do, the Midland Railway; and you will see the lovely rural pictures which fell under Bunyan’s eye as he strolled along beside the hedge-rows, from Elstow--a mile-long road--to the grammar-school at Bedford. The trees are beautiful thereabout; the grass is as green as emerald; old cottages are mossy and picturesque; gray towers of churches hang out a great wealth of ivy boughs; sleek Durham cattle and trim sheep feed contentedly on the Bedford meadows, and rooks, cawing, gather into flocks and disperse, and glide down singly, or by pairs, into the tops of trees that shade country houses. The aspects have not changed much in all these years; even the cottage of Bunyan’s tinker father is still there, with only a new front upon it. The boy received but little schooling, and that at hap-hazard; but he got much religious teaching from the elders of the Baptist chapel, or from this or that old Puritan villager. A stern doctrinal theology overshadowed all his boyish years, full of threatening, fiery darts, and full of golden streaks of promise. He was a badish boy--as most boys are; a goodly _quantum_ of original sin in him; he says, with his tender conscience, that he was “very bad;” a child of the devil; swearing, sometimes; playing “three old cat” very often; picking flowers, I dare say, or idly looking at the rooks of a Sunday. Yet I would engage that the Newhaven High School would furnish thirty or forty as bad ones as John Bunyan any day in the year. But he makes good resolves; breaks them again; finally is convicted, but falters; marries young (and, as would seem, foolishly, neither bride nor groom being turned of twenty), and she bringing for sole dower not so much as one dish or spoon, but only two good books--_The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven_ and _The Practice of Piety_.