John Bunyan, who wrote _The Pilgrim's Progress_, was the son of a tinker. He was himself a tinker. He was a soldier in Cromwell's army, and then he was a preacher. Only certain people were allowed to preach at that time, and they arrested Bunyan. He was in prison a number of years. They were willing to let him out, but he would not promise not to preach. Brave John Bunyan! He had a brave wife too, who did all she could to help him. He was sentenced to prison twice, the second time only for a few months when he was kept in the gaol in Bedford town in England. Bunyan wrote _The Pilgrim's Progress_ in a room in Bedford gaol which is built on the bridge that crosses the river Ouse, and while he wrote he could hear the noise of the river flowing by. Perhaps this is one reason why he writes so beautifully of rivers in the story. {147} CHAPTER XXII THACKERAY--MEREDITH--HARDY You remember David Copperfield, Peggoty, Mr. Pickwick, Sam Weller, and scores of others, all of whom we found living so intensely and abundantly in Dickens' novels. Many other novelists, as well as Charles Dickens, have made interesting, delightful characters for us to know and love. In this chapter and the chapter following, we will learn something of a group of writers, men and women, in whose novels we find wonderful knowledge of human nature, not as wonderful as Shakespeare's knowledge perhaps, but showing the same deep insight as Scott and Dickens. The writers spoken of are not very widely separated in time. Two of them lived and wrote as recently as from the middle of the nineteenth century down to the present. George Meredith died in 1909, and Thomas Hardy in 1928. The whole group represents a very brilliant period in English literature. William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta in India. Like the children of other Anglo-Indian civil servants, he was sent home to England when he was a very little boy, leaving his mother behind him in India. Thackeray had a deeply affectionate nature. All his life he was devoted to his own people. No one can rightly {148} understand his novels who does not remember that Thackeray was tender-hearted. We can read a letter that the little boy William Makepeace wrote to his mother when he was seven years old. His mother kept it carefully. Some years ago when his daughter, Mrs. Ritchie, herself a novelist, was writing memories of her famous father, she printed the little letter in her Introduction to _The Newcomes_.