From this description of the surroundings among which Bunyan passed the earliest and most impressionable years of his life, we pass to the subject of our biography himself. The notion that Bunyan was of gipsy descent, which was not entirely rejected by Sir Walter Scott, and which has more recently received elaborate support from writers on the other side of the Atlantic, may be pronounced absolutely baseless. Even if Bunyan's inquiry of his father "whether the family was of Israelitish descent or no," which has been so strangely pressed into the service of the theory, could be supposed to have anything to do with the matter, the decided negative with which his question was met--"he told me, 'No, we were not'"--would, one would have thought, have settled the point. But some fictions die hard. However low the family had sunk, so that in his own words, "his father's house was of that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families in the land," "of a low and inconsiderable generation," the name, as we have seen, was one of long standing in Bunyan's native county, and had once taken far higher rank in it. And his parents, though poor, were evidently worthy people, of good repute among their village neighbours. Bunyan seems to be describing his own father and his wandering life when he speaks of "an honest poor labouring man, who, like Adam unparadised, had all the world to get his bread in, and was very careful to maintain his family." He and his wife were also careful with a higher care that their children should be properly educated. "Notwithstanding the meanness and inconsiderableness of my parents," writes Bunyan, "it pleased God to put it into their hearts to put me to school, to learn both to read and write." If we accept the evidence of the "Scriptural Poems," published for the first time twelve years after his death, the genuineness of which, though questioned by Dr. Brown, there seems no sufficient reason to doubt, the little education he had was "gained in a grammar school." This would have been that founded by Sir William Harpur in Queen Mary's reign in the neighbouring town of Bedford. Thither we may picture the little lad trudging day by day along the mile and a half of footpath and road from his father's cottage by the brookside, often, no doubt, wet and miry enough, not, as he says, to "go to school to Aristotle or Plato," but to be taught "according to the rate of other poor men's children." The Bedford schoolmaster about this time, William Barnes by name, was a negligent sot, charged with "night-walking" and haunting "taverns and alehouses," and other evil practices, as well as with treating the poor boys "when present" with a cruelty which must have made them wish that his absences, long as they were, had been more protracted. Whether this man was his master or no, it was little that Bunyan learnt at school, and that little he confesses with shame he soon