eeming earth,
and gives yet a sweeter smell to the lovely
flowers that adorn these verdant meadows."

[Illustration: IZAAK WALTON.]

[Illustration: JEREMY TAYLOR.]

VII. Of the many authors busily writing on theology, Jeremy Taylor
(1613-1667), an Episcopal clergyman, holds the chief place. His
imagination was so wide and his pen so facile that he has been called
a seventeenth-century prose Shakespeare. Taylor's _Holy Living_ and
_Holy Dying_ used to be read in almost every cottage. This passage
shows his powers of imagery as well as the Teutonic inclination to
consider the final goal of youth and beauty:--

"Reckon but from the sprightfulness
of youth, and the fair cheeks and full
eyes of childhood, from the vigorousness
and strong texture of the joints of five-and-twenty,
to the hollowness and dead
paleness, to the loathsomeness and horror of a three days' burial,
and we shall perceive the distance to be very great and very
strange. But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts
of its hood, and at first it was fair as morning, and full with the
dew of heaven as a lamb's fleece ... and at night, having lost some
of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds
and outworn faces."

JOHN BUNYAN, 1628-1688

[Illustration: JOHN BUNYAN. _From the painting by Sadler, National
Portrait Gallery_.]

Life.--The Bedfordshire village of Elstow saw in 1628 the birth of
John Bunyan who, in his own peculiar field of literature, was to lead
the world. His father, Thomas Bunyan, was a brazier, a mender of pots
and pans, and he reared his son John to the same trade. In his
autobiography, John Bunyan says that his father's house was of "that
rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families in the
land."

The boy went to school for only a short time and learned but little
from any books except the _Bible_. The father, by marrying a second
time within a year after his wife's death, wounded the feelings of his
sixteen-year-old son sufficiently to cause the latter to enlist as a
soldier in the Civil War. At about the age of twenty, Bunyan married,
though neither he nor his wife had at the time so much as a dish or a
spoon.

Bunyan tells us that in his youth he was very wicked. Probably he
would have been so regarded from the point of view of a strict
Puritan. His worst offenses, however, seem to have been dancing on the
village green, playing hockey on Sunda