JOHN BUNYAN AND HIS PORTRAIT.—DID BUNYAN KNOW HOBBES?
(Vol. ii., pp. 476. 518.; Vol. iii., p. 70.)
The best portrait of John Bunyan was drawn and engraved by White, to the Holy War, 1682. The original drawing, and a fine impression of the engraving, is preserved in the illustrated Grainger's History of England, in the print-room at the British Museum. It was copied in folio for Bunyan's Works. It has been recently copied for Mr. Bogue's elegant edition of the Pilgrim, and for the first complete edition of Bunyan's Works, now publishing by Messrs. Blackie and Sons, Glasgow. A fac-simile was engraved for an edition of the Pilgrim, by Mr. Pickering, 8vo. 1849.
That the great allegorist was not the author of Heart's Ease in Heart Trouble is perfectly clear, not only that the style is very different, but from the author being known. It was first published in 1690, under the initials of J. B., and the Epistle is dated "From the house of my pilgrimage, March, 1690." Bunyan died in August, 1688. Mr. Palmer, in his Calamy, vol. ii. p.16., states that the author was James Birdwood.
Whether Bunyan was acquainted with Hobbes depends upon the authority of a small volume of Visions of Heaven and Hell, published under the name of Bunyan. In this it is represented that he saw poor Hobbes in hell, and recognised an old acquaintance.
The earliest edition of The Visions which I have been able to discover, is at "London: printed for Edward Midwinter, at the Looking Glass upon London Bridge, price, bound, one shilling;" without date. It was printed early in the reign of George I.; this is seen in an advertisement of books at the end, among which is The Lives of the Monarchs of England to his present Majesty King George. It is entitled, The Visions of John Bunyan, being his last remains. There is no account of either of this, or the Heart's Ease, in The Struggler for the Preservation of Mr. John Bunyan's Labours. This gives a list of forty-three works published by him, and of seventeen left by him at his decease for publication. If The Visions were written by him, it must have escaped the search of his widow and surviving friends; but the style at once proves that it was not a production of his prolific pen. Bunyan's style was remarkably simple and plain. The following phrases extracted from The Visions will carry conviction to every reader:—
"Mormo's of a future state," "metempsychosis of nature," "nefandous villanies," "diurnal and annual," "my visive faculty," "soul-transparent and diaphonous," "translucid ray," "terrene enjoyments," "our minds are clarified," "types both of the ante and post-diluvian world," "the tenuity thereof," "the aereal heavens," "effluxes of divine glory," "all ænigmas," "corruscations of his divine nature," "Solomon's mystick epithalamium," "the epiphonema," "propinquity in nature," "diversified refractions," "too bright and too diaphonous," "sweet odes and eniphalamics," "amarantine crown," "bright corruscancy," "palinodies and elegies," "no cataplasm," "eccentricks quite exterminate," "mutual assassinates," &c. &c.
Such phrases and terms plain John Bunyan utterly despised. They prove, as does the whole plan of the treatise, that it must have been a very different man to the author of the Pilgrim's Progress who wrote these Visions.
It is not likely that Hobbes and Bunyan were acquainted; they lived in distant parts of the country. Bunyan's Pilgrim, which was the foundation of his wide-spread fame, was not published till 1678, when the Leviathan philosopher was ninety years of age; he died in 1679. Hobbes' company were the learned and illustrious among men,—the Des Carteses, Gassendis, and Wallises of his age; while Bunyan associated with the despised Nonconformists. Nor is is likely that Bunyan read the Leviathan; Dent's Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven, The Practice of Piety, Fox's Martyrs, and, above all, his Bible, constituted his library during his imprisonment for conscience-sake, which lasted from 1660 to 1672. Had he suffered from Hobbes's philosophy, he would have proclaimed it upon the house-tops, especially in his Grace Abounding, that others might have been guarded from such dangerous scepticism. The Vision of Hobbes was doubtless intended to render the forgery more popular.
George Offor.
Hackney, Jan. 1851.