zealous Tory. "The wild Indians," he | Bolingbroke had been before him, the said, " 'give no quarter, because they prime minister of a king without a believe that they shall inherit the skill kingdom. But the new favourite found, and prowess of every adversary whom as Bolingbroke had found before him, they destroy. Perhaps the animosity that it was quite as hard to keep the of the right reverend prelates to their shadow of power under a vagrant and brother may be explained in the same mendicant prince as to keep the reality way." of power at Westminster. Though James had neither territories nor revenues, neither army nor navy, there was more faction and more intrigue among his courtiers than among those of his successful rival. Atterbury soon perceived that his counsels were disregarded, if not distrusted. His proud spirit was deeply wounded. He quitted Paris, fixed his residence at Montpellier, gave up politics, and devoted himself entirely to letters. In the sixth

Atterbury took leave of those whom he loved with a dignity and tenderness worthy of a better man. Three fine lines of his favourite poet were often in his mouth:

66

Some natural tears he dropped, but wiped

them soon:

The world was all before him, where to chuse
His place of rest, and Providence his guide."

66

illness that his daughter, herself in very delicate health, determined to run all risks that she might see him once more. Having obtained a license from the English Government, she went by sea to Bordeaux, but landed there in such a state that she could travel only by boat or in a litter. Her father, in spite of his infirmities, set out from Montpellier to meet her; and she, with the impatience which is often the sign of approaching death, hastened towards him. Those who were about her in vain implored her to travel slowly. She said that every hour was precious, that she only wished to see her papa and to die. She met him at Toulouse, embraced him, received from his hand the sacred bread and wine, and thanked God that they had passed one day in each other's society before they parted for ever. She died that night.

At parting he presented Pope with a Bible, and said, with a disingenuous-year of his exile he had so severe an ness of which no man who had studied the Bible to much purpose would have been guilty: "If ever you learn that I have any dealings with the Pretender, I give you leave to say that my punishment is just." Pope at this time really believed the bishop to be an injured man. Arbuthnot seems to have been of the same opinion. Swift, a few months later, ridiculed with great bitterness, in the Voyage to Laputa," the evidence which had satisfied the two Houses of Parliament. Soon, however, the most partial friends of the banished prelate ceased to assert his innocence, and contented themselves with lamenting and excusing what they could not defend. After a short stay at Brussels, he had taken up his abode at Paris, and had become the leading man among the Jacobite refugees who were assembled there. He was invited to Rome by the Pretender, who then held his mock court under the immediate protection of the Pope. But Atterbury felt that a bishop of the Church of England would be strangely out of place at the Vatican, and declined the invitation. During some months, however, he might flatter himself that he stood high in the good graces of James. The correspondence between the master and the servant was constant. Atterbury's merits were warmly acknowledged; his advice was respectfully received; and he was, as

It was some time before even the strong mind of Atterbury recovered from this cruel blow. As soon as he was himself again he became eager for action and conflict; for grief, which disposes gentle natures to retirement, to inaction, and to meditation, only makes restless spirits more restless. The Pretender, dull and bigoted as he was, had found out that he had not acted wisely in parting with one who, though a heretic, was, in abilities and accomplishments, the foremost man of the Jacobite party. The bishop was

U

King James was to be proclaimed. The had been set in the case of Sir John design became known to the Duke of Fenwick, and to pass an act for cutting Orleans, regent of France, who was on off the bishop's head. Cadogan, who terms of friendship with the House of commanded the army, a brave soldier, Hanover. He put the English govern- but a headstrong politician, is said to ment on its guard. Some of the chief have exclaimed with great vehemence : malcontents were committed to prison; "Fling him to the lions in the Tower." and among them was Atterbury. No But the wiser and more humane Walbishop of the Church of England had pole was always unwilling to shed been taken into custody since that me- blood; and his influence prevailed. morable day when the applauses and When parliament met, the evidence prayers of all London had followed the against the bishop was laid before comseven bishops to the gate of the Tower. mittees of both houses. Those commitThe Opposition entertained some hope tees reported that his guilt was proved. that it might be possible to excite In the Commons a resolution, proamong the people an enthusiasm re-nouncing him a traitor, was carried by sembling that of their fathers, who nearly two to one. A bill was then rushed into the waters of the Thames introduced which provided that he to implore the blessing of Sancroft. should be deprived of his spiritual Pictures of the heroic confessor in his dignities, that he should be banished cell were exhibited at the shop win- for life, and that no British subject dows. Verses in his praise were sung should hold any intercourse with him about the streets. The restraints by except by the royal permission. which he was prevented from communicating with his accomplices were re-little difficulty. For the bishop, though presented as cruelties worthy of the dungeons of the Inquisition. Strong appeals were made to the priesthood. Would they tamely permit so gross an insult to be offered to their cloth? Would they suffer the ablest, the most eloquent member of their profession, the man who had so often stood up for their rights against the civil power, to be treated like the vilest of mankind? There was considerable excitement; | listened to him with mingled aversion but it was allayed by a temperate and artful letter to the clergy, the work, in all probability, of Bishop Gibson, who stood high in the favour of Walpole, and shortly after became minister for ecclesiastical affairs.

Atterbury remained in close confinement during some months. He had carried on his correspondence with the exiled family so cautiously that the circumstantial proofs of his guilt, though sufficient to produce entire moral conviction, were not sufficient to justify legal conviction. He could be reached only by a bill of pains and penalties. Such a bill the Whig party, then decidedly predominant in both houses, was quite prepared to support. Many hot-headed members of that party were eager to follow the precedent which

This bill passed the Commons with

invited to defend himself, chose to reserve his defence for the assembly of which he was a member. In the Lords the contest was sharp. The young Duke of Wharton, distinguished by his parts, his dissoluteness, and his versatility, spoke for Atterbury with great effect; and Atterbury's own voice was heard for the last time by that unfriendly audience which had so often

and delight. He produced few witnesses; nor did those witnesses say much that could be of service to him. Among them was Pope. He was called to prove that, while he was an inmate of the palace at Bromley, the bishop's time was completely occupied by literary and domestic matters, and that no leisure was left for plotting. But Pope, who was quite unaccustomed to speak in public, lost his head, and, as he afterwards owned, though he had only ten words to say, made two or three blunders.

The bill finally passed the Lords by eighty-three votes to forty-three. The bishops, with a single exception, were in the majority. Their conduct drew on them a sharp taunt from Lord Bathurst, a warm friend of Atterbury and a

Atterbury took leave of those whom he loved with a dignity and tenderness worthy of a better man. Three fine lines of his favourite poet were often in his mouth:

"Some natural tears he dropped, but wiped

them soon:

The world was all before him, where to chuse
His place of rest, and Providence his guide."

zealous Tory. "The wild Indians," he | Bolingbroke had been before him, the said, "give no quarter, because they prime minister of a king without a believe that they shall inherit the skill kingdom. But the new favourite found, and prowess of every adversary whom as Bolingbroke had found before him, they destroy. Perhaps the animosity that it was quite as hard to keep the of the right reverend prelates to their shadow of power under a vagrant and brother may be explained in the same mendicant prince as to keep the reality way." of power at Westminster. Though James had neither territories nor revenues, neither army nor navy, there was more faction and more intrigue among his courtiers than among those of his successful rival. Atterbury soɔn perceived that his counsels were disregarded, if not distrusted. His proud spirit was deeply wounded. He quitted Paris, fixed his residence at Montpellier, gave up politics, and devoted himself entirely to letters. In the sixth year of his exile he had so severe an illness that his daughter, herself in very delicate health, determined to run all risks that she might see him once more. Having obtained a license from the English Government, she went by sea to Bordeaux, but landed there in such a state that she could travel only by boat or in a litter. Her father, in spite of his infirmities, set out from Montpellier to meet her; and she, with the impatience which is often the sign of approaching death, hastened towards him. Those who were about her in vain implored her to travel slowly. She said that every hour was precious, that she only wished to see her papa and to die. She met him at Toulouse, embraced him, received from his hand the sacred bread and wine, and thanked God that they had passed one day in each other's society before they parted for ever. She died that night.

At parting he presented Pope with a Bible, and said, with a disingenuousness of which no man who had studied the Bible to much purpose would have been guilty: "If ever you learn that I have any dealings with the Pretender, I give you leave to say that my punishment is just." Pope at this time really believed the bishop to be an injured man. Arbuthnot seems to have been of the same opinion. Swift, a few months later, ridiculed with great bitterness, in the " Voyage to Laputa,' the evidence which had satisfied the two Houses of Parliament. Soon, however, the most partial friends of the banished prelate ceased to assert his innocence, and contented themselves with lamenting and excusing what they could not defend. After a short stay at Brussels, he had taken up his abode at Paris, and had become the leading man among the Jacobite refugees who were assembled there. He was invited to Rome by the Pretender, who then held his mock court under the immediate protection of the Pope. But Atterbury felt that a bishop of the Church of England would be strangely out of place at the Vatican, and declined the invitation. During some months, however, he might flatter himself that he stood high in the good graces of James. The correspondence between the master and the servant was constant. Atterbury's merits were warmly acknowledged; his advice was respectfully received; and he was, as

It was some time before even the strong mind of Atterbury recovered from this cruel blow. As soon as he was himself again he became eager for action and conflict; for grief, which disposes gentle natures to retirement, to inaction, and to meditation, only makes restless spirits more restless. The Pretender, dull and bigoted as he was, had found out that he had not acted wisely in parting with one who, though a heretic, was, in abilities and accomplishments, the foremost man of the Jacobite party. The bishop was

U

the parliamentary proceedings against him, which will be found in the State Trials, from the five volumes of his correspondence, edited by Mr. Nichols, and from the first volume of the Stuart papers, edited by Mr. Glover. A very indulgent but a very interesting account of the bishop's political career will be found in Lord Mahon's valuable History of England.

JOHN BUNYAN. (MAY 1854.)

courted back, and was without much | collect it from his sermons and his condifficulty induced to return to Paris troversial writings, from the report of and to become once more the phantom minister of a phantom monarchy. But his long and troubled life was drawing to a close. To the last, however, his intellect retained all its keenness and vigour. He learned, in the ninth year of his banishment, that he had been accused by Oldmixon, as dishonest and malignant a scribbler as any that has been saved from oblivion by the Dunciad, of having, in concert with other Christ-Church-men, garbled Clarendon's History of the Rebellion. The charge, as respected Atterbury, had not the slightest foundation: for he was not one of the editors of the History, and never saw it till it was printed. He published a short vindi- JOHN BUNYAN, the most popular relication of himself, which is a model in gious writer in the English language, its kind, luminous, temperate, and dig-was born at Elstow, about a mile from nified. A copy of this little work he Bedford, in the year 1628. He may sent to the Pretender, with a letter be said to have been born a tinker. The singularly eloquent and graceful. It tinkers then formed an hereditary caste, was impossible, the old man said, that which was held in no high estimation. he should write anything on such a They were generally vagrants and pilsubject without being reminded of the ferers, and were often confounded with resemblance between his own fate and the gipsies, whom in truth they nearly that of Clarendon. They were the resembled. Bunyan's father was more only two English subjects that had respectable than most of the tribe. He ever been banished from their country had a fixed residence, and was able to and debarred from all communication send his son to a village school where with their friends by act of parliament. reading and writing were taught. But here the resemblance ended. One of the exiles had been so happy as to bear a chief part in the restoration of the Royal house. All that the other could now do was to die asserting the rights of that house to the last. A few weeks after this letter was written Atterbury died. He had just completed his seventieth year.

The years of John's boyhood were those during which the puritan spirit was in the highest vigour all over England; and nowhere had that spirit more influence than in Bedfordshire. It is not wonderful, therefore, that a lad to whom nature had given a powerful imagination, and sensibility which amounted to a disease, should have been early haunted by religious terrors. Before he was ten, his sports were interrupted by fits of remorse and despair; and his sleep was disturbed by dreams of fiends trying to fly away with him. As he grew older, his mental conflicts became still more violent. The strong

His body was brought to England, and laid, with great privacy, under the nave of Westminster Abbey. Only three mourners followed the coffin. No inscription marks the grave. That the epitaph with which Pope honoured the memory of his friend does not appear on the walls of the great national ceme-language in which he described them tery is no subject of regret : for nothing worse was ever written by Colley Cibber.

Those who wish for more complete information about Atterbury may easily

has strangely misled all his biographers except Mr. Southey. It has long been an ordinary practice with pious writers to cite Bunyan as an instance of the supernatural power of divine grace to

but he tells us that a single reproof cured him so effectually that he never offended again. The worst that can be laid to the charge of this poor youth, whom it has been the fashion to represent as the most desperate of reprobates, as a village Rochester, is that he had a great liking for some diversions, quite harmless in themselves, but condemned by the rigid precisians among whom he lived, and for whose opinion he had a great respect. The four chief sins of which he was guilty were danc

rescue the human soul from the lowest | loose the reins on the neck of his lusts, depths of wickedness. He is called in that he had delighted in all transgresone book the most notorious of profli- sions against the divine law, and that gates; in another, the brand plucked he had been the ringleader of the youth from the burning. He is designated of Elstow in all manner of vice. But, in Mr. Ivimey's History of the Baptists when those who wished him ill accused as the depraved Bunyan, the wicked him of licentious amours, he called on tinker of Elstow. Mr. Ryland, a man God and the angels to attest his purity. once of great note among the Dissent- No woman, he said, in heaven, earth, ers, breaks out into the following rhap- or hell, could charge him with having sody:-"No man of common sense and ever made any improper advances to common integrity can deny that Bun- her. Not only had he been strictly yan was a practical atheist, a worthless faithful to his wife; but he had, even contemptible infidel, a vile rebel to God before his marriage, been perfectly and goodness, a common profligate, a spotless. It does not appear from his soul-despising, a soul-murdering, a own confessions, or from the railings soul-damning, thoughtless wretch as of his enemies, that he ever was drunk could exist on the face of the earth. in his life. One bad habit he conNow be astonished, O heavens, to eter-tracted, that of using profane language; nity and wonder, O earth and hell! while time endures. Behold this very man become a miracle of mercy, a mirror of wisdom, goodness, holiness, truth, and love." But whoever takes the trouble to examine the evidence will find that the good men who wrote this had been deceived by a phraseology which, as they had been hearing it and using it all their lives, they ought to have understood better. There cannot be a greater mistake than to infer, from the strong expressions in which a devout man bemoans his ex-ing, ringing the bells of the parish ceeding sinfulness, that he has led a worse life than his neighbours. Many excellent persons, whose moral character from boyhood to old age has been free from any stain discernible to their fellow-creatures, have, in their autobiographies and diaries, applied to themselves, and doubtless with sincerity, epithets as severe as could be applied to Titus Oates or Mrs. Brownrigg. It is quite certain that Bunyan was, at eighteen, what, in any but the most austerely puritanical circles, would have been considered as a young man of singular gravity and innocence. Indeed, it may be remarked that he, like many other penitents who, in general terms, acknowledge themselves to have been the worst of mankind, fired up and stood vigorously on his defence, whenever any particular charge was brought against him by others. He declares, it is true, that he had let

church, playing at tipcat, and reading the history of Sir Bevis of Southampton. A rector of the school of Laud would have held such a young man up to the whole parish as a model. But Bunyan's notions of good and evil had been learned in a very different school; and he was made miserable by the conflict between his tastes and his scruples.

When he was about seventeen, the ordinary course of his life was interrupted by an event which gave a lasting colour to his thoughts. He enlisted in the parliamentary army, and served during the decisive campaign of 1645. All that we know of his military career is that, at the siege of Leicester, one of his comrades, who had taken his post, was killed by a shot from the town. Bunyan ever after considered himself as having been saved from death by the special inter