thus enlarged on his own experience, he calls on his spiritual children, for whose use the work was originally composed and to whom it is dedicated,--"those whom God had counted him worthy to beget to Faith by his ministry in the Word"--to survey their own religious history, to "work diligently and leave no corner unsearched." He would have them "remember their tears and prayers to God; how they sighed under every hedge for mercy. Had they never a hill Mizar (Psa. xlii. 6) to remember? Had they forgotten the close, the milkhouse, the stable, the barn, where God visited their souls? Let them remember the Word on which the Lord had caused them to hope. If they had sinned against light, if they were tempted to blaspheme, if they were down in despair, let them remember that it had been so with him, their spiritual father, and that out of them all the Lord had delivered him." This dedication ends thus: "My dear children, the milk and honey is beyond this wilderness. God be merciful to you, and grant you be not slothful to go in to possess the land." This remarkable book, as we learn from the title-page, was "written by his own hand in prison." It was first published by George Larkin in London, in 1666, the sixth year of his imprisonment, the year of the Fire of London, about the time that he experienced his first brief release. As with "The Pilgrim's Progress," the work grew in picturesque detail and graphic power in the author's hand after its first appearance. The later editions supply some of the most interesting personal facts contained in the narrative, which were wanting when it first issued from the press. His two escapes from drowning, and from the supposed sting of an adder; his being drawn as a soldier, and his providential deliverance from death; the graphic account of his difficulty in giving up bell-ringing at Elstow Church, and dancing on Sundays on Elstow Green--these and other minor touches which give a life and colour to the story, which we should be very sorry to lose, are later additions. It is impossible to over- estimate the value of the "Grace Abounding," both for the facts of Bunyan's earlier life and for the spiritual experience of which these facts were, in his eyes only the outward framework. Beginning with his parentage and boyhood, it carries us down to his marriage and life in the wayside-cottage at Elstow, his introduction to Mr. Gifford's congregation at Bedford, his joining that holy brotherhood, and his subsequent call to the work of the ministry among them, and winds up with an account of his apprehension, examinations, and imprisonment in Bedford gaol. The work concludes with a report of the conversation between his noble-hearted wife and Sir Matthew Hale and the other judges at the Midsummer assizes, narrated in a former chapter, "taken down," he says, "from her own mouth." The whole story is of such sustained interest that our chief