courtier, Butler was doomed to suffer from ingratitude. He was amused and wearied with false promises of permanent assistance, consigned to neglect, died in an obscure lodging nearly destitute, the expenses of his funeral being paid by a friend. Among the number of

"Mighty poets in their misery dead,"

Butler's name stands prominent. If we are to judge of the party he aided by the way they treated him, we should be constrained to say the sorrowful death of Butler was more condemnatory of them and their heartlessness, than all the volumes of their enemies.

Our English literature is peculiarly rich in satire. The first eminent satirist was good Bishop Hall, Marvell and Butler followed. Dryden, who tried and succeeded in nearly all kinds of composition, was peculiarly happy and forcible in satire. But his name must be reserved until we come to speak of the rise of criticism in our land.

The age of Milton was also that of many great divines, among whom Chillingworth, Barrow, Tillotson, Sherlock, Owen, and Baxter, are deservedly celebrated for purity of life, great learning, and, notwithstanding their great differences of opinion, the service their writings rendered to the cause of piety. Baxter, among innumerable excellences

of life and writings, was greatly in advance of his age in liberality to those who differed from him. Of theological controversies he says,

"My mind being these many years immersed in studies of this nature, and having also long wearied myself in searching what fathers and schoolmen have said of such things before us, and my genius abhorring confusion and equivocals, I came, by many years longer study, to perceive that most of the doctrinal controversies among Protestants are far more about equivocal words than matter; and it wounded my soul to perceive what work both tyrannical and unskilful disputing clergymen had made these thirteen hundred years in the world! Experience, since the year 1643 till this year, 1675, hath loudly called me to repent of my own prejudices, sidings, and censurings of causes and persons not understood, and of all the miscarriages of my ministry and life that have been thereby caused; and to make it my chief work to call men that are within my hearing to more peaceable thoughts, affections, and practices. And my endeavours have not been in vain, in that the ministers of the county where I lived were very many of such a peaceable temper, and a great number more through the land, by God's grace (rather than any endeavours of mine), are so minded. But the sons of the cowl were exasperated the more against me, and accounted him to be against every man that called all men to love and peace, and was for no man as in a contrary way."

There were also several historical writers contemporary with Milton, the most memorable, perhaps, being the celebrated loyalist and distinguished lawyer Lord Clarendon: many of his sketches of the celebrated men of his own time

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are so life-like and truthful, that they can never be superseded. All subsequent historians have taken his testimony, where it was not too much influenced by his manifest, and indeed avowed, prejudices.

Bulstrode Whitelocke was of opposite principles to Lord Clarendon. He wrote "Memorials of English Affairs" from the accession of Charles I. to the Restoration. He was the legal adviser of the patriot John Hampden, and a strong opponent to persecution for religious opinions.

Bishop Burnet, though somewhat later, may be classed within this period. His "History of his own Time,” though much controverted by those who held different political principles to himself, will always be read with interest for the clearness of the narrative and the vividness of the pictures.

But, next to Milton, incomparably the greatest imaginative writer in that age was John Bunyan. The life of this truly great man is well known. Born in the poorest ranks, without education, earning his living by one of the lowest occupations, that of a tinker,—nature and grace more than compensated to him for the malice of fortune. After a riotous youth, we find him (in some measure through the instrumentality of a pious wife) brought to a knowledge of the highest truth -Gospel truth. His gifts of thought and speech, though modestly undervalued by himself, attracted

attention among religious friends. They entreated and laid it upon his conscience, that he should exercise those gifts by teaching to others the spiritual truths he had so fully learned. He yielded; found his words blessed by evidences of usefulness. This confirmed him a minister. He had his credentials ratified: "seals had been given to his ministry, and souls to his hire." But, in the licentious time of the Restoration, when floods of profligacy poured over the land, and persecution arose with added strength, Bunyan was one of the first, if not the very first, to suffer for conscience' sake. He was consigned to Bedford jail twelve years, and there wrote the marvellous allegory that has chiefly endeared his memory to posterity.

Bunyan may be said to have been to the masses what Milton was to the educated. His book, long neglected, if not despised, by the great and noble, found immediate favour with the people.

There had been skilful allegories in the English language before Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress." Stephen Hawes, at a very early period, wrote his "Pastime of Pleasure," in which science, and abstract virtues and qualities, are allegorised in a style rude but quaint and graphic. Then came Spenser's glorious "Faerie Queen," a radiant web of beauty. But Bunyan had not read these his library contained the Bible and

Fox's "Book of Martyrs" only; though certainly resemblances of thought to the "Faerie Queen" are sometimes so apparent as to be very striking. Spenser's tangled wood of error, into which the perplexed knight strays, and Bunyan's “slough of despond," are sufficiently similar, as hindrances in the outset to Knight and Pilgrim, as to excite surprise at the coincidence.

There is, however, this superiority in the allegory of the great prose poet, that it has a human interest very different from the abstractions and mystic idealities of Spenser's luxuriant poem. Few, even among educated people, are able to read the "Faerie Queen" through, without weariness, spite of its exquisite passages and descriptions; while, in Bunyan's matchless allegory, all, from the child to the hoary-headed sage, agree that the interest of the narrative alone, keeps alive the attention from the first to the last page of the "Pilgrim." Its characters, its scenes, are never forgotten; they are constantly recurring as expressive of individual experience, or descriptive of persons and instances often met with in society. All is real and true.

The spiritual value, the hidden beauty folded up in that admirable work, are beyond praise. Next to the Bible, it has exercised the most widespread influence, reaching sections of society to whom books were scarcely ever addressed, and