Thus, and in his conflicts against the magistrates, he acted and suffered, in his youth, all the adventures of his own Christian and Faithful, in "The Pilgrim's Progress" (published in 1678). He left an unfading picture of some elements in English society: seventy years later he might have been a Fielding. "He was a born novelist," it has been said: but the novels of his day were the interminable romances of the French type of Scudéry. His "Grace Abounding" is as brilliant in its way as the "Confessions of Saint Augustine". His secular characters in "The Pilgrim's Progress" are as good, by way of sketches, as are the finished portraits in "Tom Jones".
In 1680 he published "The Life and Death of Mr. Badman"; in which Mr. Wiseman gives convincing reasons for his opinion "that Mr. Badman has gone to Hell". Mr. Badman, in life's gay morn, like St. Augustine, had "great pleasure in robbing orchards and gardens". "The beginning of the Lord's Day was, to Mr. Badman, as if he was going to prison." As for his eloquence he was "a Damme Blade". In literature his taste was all for "beastly Romances". In church he either slept or flirted, like Mr. Pepys. In the long run, Mr. Badman departed from his prodigal life, "quietly, peaceably, and like a lamb". It cannot be said of Mr. Badman that he had no redeeming vices; he was ill-tempered and envious; he occasionally went on the High Toby lay, and his masterpiece was a fraudulent bankruptcy. Mr. Badman is amusing, but his history, interwoven with many strong and simple anecdotes of other ruffians, cannot be compared in merit with "The Pilgrim's Progress," where the characters are so many and various; the imagination so vivid, many passages so rich in poetic qualities, and the language so simple. It is a great prose epic, a great novel of the road; and beside it "The Holy War" is tame and indistinct.
Bunyan wrote many works, now forgotten, on religious themes, and in controversial style his weapon was the cudgel. In his later days he was the most popular of Dissenting preachers. He died just before "King James was walked out of his kingdom," in 1688. If critics sneered at Bunyan throughout the nineteenth century, Dr. Johnson, at least, heartily appreciated the genius of the Non-conformist brasier.
With Bunyan-the student of the religious ferment of England in his age may well read the "Journal" of the founder of the Society of Friends, Quakers, George Fox (1624-1691). Like Bunyan, Fox was an untrained thinker and author; like Bunyan he was persecuted: he had not the genius, but he had the art of Bunyan in drawing "with his eye on the object".
Clarendon.
Edward Hyde, later Earl of Clarendon (1609-1674) of a Cheshire family, was educated at Magdalen Hall, in Oxford, and proceeded to the Middle Temple. He inherited his family's property, was distinguished for his legal knowledge, sat in Parliament when the strife between the King and the Parliament began, and took part in preparing the indictment against the great Strafford. None the less, when a general attack was made on the order of Bishops, he came over to the King's party, in 1641; and in 1646 accompanied the young Prince of Wales in his flights and wanderings, in March, to the Scilly Isles (where he began his History), and presently to Jersey. He remained with Charles II after the death of Charles I, and, if he and Montrose had been heard, the young King would never have disgraced himself by signing the Covenant; and consequently his Cause would never have been defeated at Dunbar, nor his very life imperilled after Worcester fight.
Clarendon, seven years after the Restoration, was banished by the influence of faction, as Thucydides was exiled at an early period of the war which he chronicles. It is not conceivable that histories written in such circumstances should be free from partisanship and bias: in fact no historians are exempt from prejudice.
Clarendon's history was, in the making, somewhat of a patchwork. What he wrote far away from books and papers, in 1646-1648, depends much on his memory: the book improves when he obtains contemporary narratives and letters. In exile, in 1668-1670 he wrote a Life of himself, which he later interwove with his "History of the Rebellion". Clarendon's heirs did not permit the publication of his History till 1704, from regard to the feelings of the descendants of the King's opponents. The book, in one respect, resembles the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. Much of it was written during the actual course of the events by one who bore a great part in them.
Whether in favour or in exile, Clarendon was too loyal to say all that he knew and thought about Charles I and Charles II. But when we look at his pages "touching the Scottish Canons," which preceded the despotic introduction of the Liturgy, the cause of "the Bishops' wars" (1639), we perceive, the fairness of Clarendon. He makes it perfectly clear that these Canons could only be accepted by a people inclined tamely to endure the worst excesses of tyranny. But, on Scottish affairs, Clarendon is not always trustworthy; for example he dislocates the dates as to the General Assembly of 1638, permitted (though he does not say so) by the King, and the subscribing of the Covenant, which he places after the Assembly. Mr. Gardiner, a fair historian, speaks of Clarendon's "usual habit of blundering". In his remarks on the Catholics, too, under Charles I, Clarendon can scarcely be acquitted of unfairness; considering how bitterly, in Scotland at least, they were persecuted under Charles I, and how loyally they stood by him.