"Reckon but from the sprightfulness of youth, and the fair cheeks and full eyes of childhood, from the vigorousness and strong texture of the joints of five-and-twenty, to the hollowness and dead paleness, to the loathsomeness and horror of a three days' burial, and we shall perceive the distance to be very great and very strange. But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was fair as morning, and full with the dew of heaven as a lamb's fleece ... and at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and outworn faces." JOHN BUNYAN, 1628-1688 [Illustration: JOHN BUNYAN. _From the painting by Sadler, National Portrait Gallery_.] Life.--The Bedfordshire village of Elstow saw in 1628 the birth of John Bunyan who, in his own peculiar field of literature, was to lead the world. His father, Thomas Bunyan, was a brazier, a mender of pots and pans, and he reared his son John to the same trade. In his autobiography, John Bunyan says that his father's house was of "that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families in the land." The boy went to school for only a short time and learned but little from any books except the _Bible_. The father, by marrying a second time within a year after his wife's death, wounded the feelings of his sixteen-year-old son sufficiently to cause the latter to enlist as a soldier in the Civil War. At about the age of twenty, Bunyan married, though neither he nor his wife had at the time so much as a dish or a spoon. Bunyan tells us that in his youth he was very wicked. Probably he would have been so regarded from the point of view of a strict Puritan. His worst offenses, however, seem to have been dancing on the village green, playing hockey on Sundays, ringing bells to rouse the neighborhood, and swearing. When he repented, his vivid imagination made him think that he had committed the unpardonable sin. In the terror that he felt at the prospect of the loss of his soul, he passed through much of the experience that enabled him to write the _Pilgrim's Progress_.