and the figures of men tossed up in globes of fire, and
falling down again with horrible cries and shrieks and execrations,
while devils mingled among them, and laughed aloud at their torments.
As he stood trembling, the earth sank under him, and a circle of
flames embraced him. But when he fancied he was at the point to
perish, One in shining white raiment descended and plucked him out of
that dreadful place, while the devils cried after him to take him to
the punishment which his sins had deserved. Yet he escaped the danger,
and leapt for joy when he awoke and found it was a dream.'

Mr. Southey, who thinks wisely that Bunyan's biographers have
exaggerated his early faults, considers that at worst he was a sort of
'blackguard.' This, too, is a wrong word. Young village blackguards do
not dream of archangels flying through the midst of heaven, nor were
these imaginations invented afterwards, or rhetorically exaggerated.
Bunyan was undoubtedly given to story-telling as a boy, and the
recollection of it made him peculiarly scrupulous in his statements in
later life. One trait he mentions of himself which no one would have
thought of who had not experienced the feeling, yet every person can
understand it and sympathise with it. These spectres and hobgoblins
drove him wild. He says, 'I was so overcome with despair of life and
heaven, that I should often wish either that there had been no hell,
or that I had been a devil; supposing that they were only tormentors,
and that, if it must needs be that I went thither, I might rather be a
tormentor than tormented myself.'

The visions at last ceased. God left him to himself, as he puts it,
and gave him over to his own wicked inclinations. He fell, he says,
into all kinds of vice and ungodliness without further check. The
expression is very strong, yet when we look for particulars we can
find only that he was fond of games which Puritan preciseness
disapproved. He had high animal spirits, and engaged in lawless
enterprises. Once or twice he nearly lost his life. He is sparing of
details of his outward history, for he regarded it as nothing but
vanity; but his escapes from death were providences, and therefore he
mentions them. He must have gone to the coast somewhere, for he was
once almost drowned in a creek of the sea. He fell out of a boat into
the river at another time, and it seems that he could not swim.
Afterwards he seized hold of an adder, and was not bitten by it. Thes