There is no book, except the Bible, which Bunyan is known to have perused so intently as the Acts and Monuments of John Fox, the martyrologist, one of the best of men; a work more hastily than judiciously compiled, but invaluable for that greater and far more important portion which has obtained for it its popular name of The Book of Martyrs. Bunyan’s own copy of this work is in existence, and valued of course as such a relic of such a man ought to be. It was purchased in the year 1780, by Mr. Wantner, of the Minories; from him it descended to his daughter, Mrs. Parnell, of Botolph-lane; and it was afterwards purchased, by subscription, for the Bedfordshire General Library.
This edition of The Acts and Monuments is of the date 1641, 3 vols. folio, the last of those in the black-letter, and probably the latest when it came into Bunyan’s hands. In each volume he has written his name beneath the title-page, in a large and stout print-hand. Under some of the woodcuts he has inserted a few rhymes, which are undoubtedly his own composition; and which, though much in the manner of the verses that were printed under the illustrations of his own Pilgrim’s Progress, when that work was first adorned with cuts, (verses worthy of such embellishments,) are very much worse than even the worst of those. Indeed, it would not be possible to find specimens of more miserable doggerel.
Here is one of the Tinker’s tetrasticks, penned in the margin, beside the account of Gardiner’s death:—
“The blood, the blood that he did shed
Is falling one his one head;
And dredfull it is for to see
The beginers of his misere.”
One of the signatures bears the date of 1662; but the verses must undoubtedly have been some years earlier, before the publication of his first tract. These curious inscriptions must have been Bunyan’s first attempts in verse: he had, no doubt, found difficulty enough in tinkering them to make him proud of his work when it was done; otherwise, he would not have written them in a book which was the most valuable of all his goods and chattels. In later days, he seems to have taken this book for his art of poetry. His verses are something below the pitch of Sternhold and Hopkins. But if he learnt there to make bad verses, he entered fully into the spirit of its better parts, and received that spirit into as resolute a heart as ever beat in a martyr’s bosom.[1]
LITERARY LOCALITIES.
Leigh Hunt pleasantly says:—“I can no more pass through Westminster, without thinking of Milton; or the Borough, without thinking of Chaucer and Shakspeare; or Gray’s Inn, without calling Bacon to mind; or Bloomsbury-square, without Steele and Akenside; than I can prefer brick and mortar to wit and poetry, or not see a beauty upon it beyond architecture in the splendour of the recollection. I once had duties to perform which kept me out late at night, and severely taxed my health and spirits. My path lay through a neighbourhood in which Dryden lived, and though nothing could be more common-place, and I used to be tired to the heart and soul of me, I never hesitated to go a little out of the way, purely that I might pass through Gerard-street, and so give myself the shadow of a pleasant thought.”