e yet restrained personal
feeling which carries more conviction than any argument. _Samson_ is in
many respects the most convincing of his works. Entirely apart from the
interest of its subject and treatment, one may obtain from it a better idea
of what great tragedy was among the Greeks than from any other work in our
language.

Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail
Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt,
Dispraise or blame,--nothing but well and fair,
And what may quiet us in a death so noble.

III. PROSE WRITERS OF THE PURITAN PERIOD

JOHN BUNYAN (1628-1688)

As there is but one poet great enough to express the Puritan spirit, so
there is but one commanding prose writer, John Bunyan. Milton was the child
of the Renaissance, inheritor of all its culture, and the most profoundly
educated man of his age. Bunyan was a poor, uneducated tinker. From the
Renaissance he inherited nothing; but from the Reformation he received an
excess of that spiritual independence which had caused the Puritan struggle
for liberty. These two men, representing the extremes of English life in
the seventeenth century, wrote the two works that stand to-day for the
mighty Puritan spirit. One gave us the only epic since _Beowulf_; the other
gave us our only great allegory, which has been read more than any other
book in our language save the Bible.

LIFE OF BUNYAN. Bunyan is an extraordinary figure; we must study him, as
well as his books. Fortunately we have his life story in his own words,
written with the same lovable modesty and sincerity that marked all his
work. Reading that story now, in _Grace Abounding_, we see two great
influences at work in his life. One, from within, was his own vivid
imagination, which saw visions, allegories, parables, revelations, in every
common event. The other, from without, was the spiritual ferment of the
age, the multiplication of strange sects,--Quakers, Free-Willers, Ranters,
Anabaptists, Millenarians,--and the untempered zeal of all classes, like an
engine without a balance wheel, when men were breaking away from authority
and setting up their own religious standards. Bunyan's life is an epitome
of that astonishing religious individualism which marked the close of the
English Reformation.

He was born in the little village of Elstow, near Bedford, in 1628, the son
of a poor tinker. For a little while the boy was sent to school, where he
learned to read and write after a