was
compared to Alexander the coppersmith. He was told that if he would give up
preaching he should be instantly liberated. He was warned that if he
persisted in disobeying the law he would be liable to banishment, and that
if he were found in England after a certain time his neck would be
stretched. His answer was, "If you let me out to-day, I will preach again
to-morrow." Year after year he lay patiently in a dungeon, compared with
which the worst prison now to be found in the island is a palace.[5] His
fortitude is the more extraordinary because his domestic feelings were
unusually strong. Indeed, he was considered by his stern brethren as
somewhat too fond and indulgent a parent. He had four small children, and
among them a daughter who was blind, and whom he loved with peculiar
tenderness. He could not, he said, bear even to let the wind blow on her;
and now she must suffer cold and hunger; she must beg; she must be beaten;
"yet," he added, "I must, I must do it."

His second wife, whom he had married just before his arrest, tried in vain
for his release; she even petitioned the House of Lords on his behalf.
While he lay in prison he could do nothing in the way of his old trade for
the support of his family. He determined, therefore, to take up a new
trade. He learned to make long-tagged thread laces; and many thousands of
these articles were furnished by him to the hawkers. While his hands were
thus busied he had other employments for his mind and his lips. He gave
religious instruction to his fellow-captives, and formed from among them a
little flock, of which he was himself the pastor. He studied indefatigably
the few books which he possessed. His two chief companions were the Bible
and Fox's _Book of Martyrs_. His knowledge of the Bible was such that he
might have been called a living concordance; and on the margin of his copy
of the _Book of Martyrs_ are still legible the ill-spelt lines of doggerel
in which he expressed his reverence for the brave sufferers, and his
implacable enmity to the mystical Babylon.

Prison life gave him leisure to write, and during his first imprisonment he
wrote, in addition to several tracts and some verse, _Grace Abounding to
the Chief of Sinners_, the narrative of his own religious experience. The
book was published in 1666. A short period of freedom was followed by a
second offence and a further imprisonment. Bunyan's works were coarse,
indeed, but they showed a keen mother wi