The popularity of Bunyan, the non-resisting ever-preaching Dissenter; and of Walton, the angling Churchman, rests to a great extent on their characters. Differing as they did about the right of Bishops to exist, and about Justification by Faith, could the two men have met, and kept off these topics, they would "have had good talk". Each had abundant humour, each was a keen observer of Nature and of human nature, each was a lover of peace, each had a modest little fount of poetry within him. Of each it may be said, as of Scott, "he is such a friendly writer," and each is plain and intelligible, Bunyan had no artifices of style, though Walton sometimes, by study, is able to rival the harmonies of Sip Thomas Browne. Bunyan, who came of a very old landed family which had steadily lost all its lands to the last acre, was born in a cottage at Elstow, near Bedford, in 1628. He was taught reading and writing; and pursued his father's trade--that recommended by Mr. Dick for David Copperfield,--he was a brasier, or tinker, but not a wandering tinker. In early youth he was a leader in sports and games; you would have said "he wasna the stuff they made Whigs o'". Far from that, a native genius for expression first declared itself in his being "the ungodliest fellow for swearing"--which was not recognized as a literary exercise. He was under arms, like other lads of his age, but we have no reason to suppose that he was ever under fire, and his militia (Parliamentary, probably) was soon disbanded. In his "Grace Abounding for the Chief of Sinners" (1666) he writes his religious autobiography; a work composed in prison, to which he was consigned because he would not cease to be instant in preaching. "The Philistines understand me not," he says in his Preface. He writes for lowly devotees, "Have you forgot the Close, the Milk House, the Stable, the Barn, and the like where God did visit your souls,"--with "terrors of conscience and fears of Death and Hell?" Even in his joyous youth, Bunyan had dreamed of "devils and wicked spirits," which probably did not trouble Shakespeare or Walton. At 9 years old he suffered from the nightmares that haunted R. L. Stevenson. His book is the most vivid description possible of the life of an imaginative lad, standing between gross pleasures and terrors of hell. A Voice and an Appearance came to him while playing at a kind of rudimentary cricket: he went on playing, but fell into religious hypochondria. The vividness of his imagination conjured up such scenery as he uses in his great Allegory: he beheld comforting words "that seemed to be writ in _great_ letters," and so at last found consolation in faith.