CHAPTER VI.
There were some unsavory names which crept into the opening of our last chapter; but they were sweet in the nostrils of Charles II. Of such were Buckingham, Rochester, Etherege, Dorset, and the Castelmaine. And we made a little moral counterpoise by the naming of Baxter’s Saints’ Rest, and of Tillotson, and of the healthful, noble verse of Andrew Marvell, by which we wished to impress upon our readers the fact that the whole world of England in that day was not given over to French court-dances and to foul-mouthed poets; but that the Puritan leaven was still working, even in literary ways, and that there were men of dignity, knowledge, culture, and rank, who never bowed down to such as the pretty Duchess of Portsmouth.
We had our glimpse of that witty buffoon Samuel Butler, who made clever antics in rhyme; and I think, we listened with a curious eagerness to what Samuel Pepys had to say of his play-going, and of the black patches with which his pretty wife set forth her beauty. Then came Bunyan, with his great sermonizing in barns and woods, and that far finer sermonizing which in the days of his jailhood took shape in the immortal story of Christian and Great-heart. He died over a grocer’s shop, in Snow Hill, London (its site now all effaced by the great Holborn Viaduct), whither he had gone on a preaching bout in the year 1688, only a few months before James II. was driven from his throne. It is worth going out by the City Road—only a short walk from Finsbury Square—to the cemetery of Bunhill Fields, where Bunyan was buried—to see the marble figure of the tinker preacher stretched upon the monument modern admirers have built, and to see Christian toiling below, with his burden strapped to his back.