, and writing out his
descriptions to the last. He only lived long enough to correct his
final sheet for the press, and died on the very day that his work was
published!

Courageous men have often turned enforced solitude to account in
executing works of great pith and moment. It is in solitude that the
passion for spiritual perfection best nurses itself. The soul communes
with itself in loneliness until its energy often becomes intense. But
whether a man profits by solitude or not will mainly depend upon his
own temperament, training, and character. While, in a large-natured man,
solitude will make the pure heart purer, in the small-natured man it
will only serve to make the hard heart still harder: for though solitude
may be the nurse of great spirits, it is the torment of small ones.

It was in prison that Boetius wrote his 'Consolations of Philosophy,'
and Grotius his 'Commentary on St. Matthew,' regarded as his masterwork
in Biblical Criticism. Buchanan composed his beautiful 'Paraphrases
on the Psalms' while imprisoned in the cell of a Portuguese monastery.
Campanella, the Italian patriot monk, suspected of treason, was immured
for twenty-seven years in a Neapolitan dungeon, during which, deprived
of the sun's light, he sought higher light, and there created his
'Civitas Solis,' which has been so often reprinted and reproduced in
translations in most European languages. During his thirteen years'
imprisonment in the Tower, Raleigh wrote his 'History of the World,' a
project of vast extent, of which he was only able to finish the first
five books. Luther occupied his prison hours in the Castle of Wartburg
in translating the Bible, and in writing the famous tracts and treatises
with which he inundated all Germany.

It was to the circumstance of John Bunyan having been cast into gaol
that we probably owe the 'Pilgrim's Progress.' He was thus driven in
upon himself; having no opportunity for action, his active mind
found vent in earnest thinking and meditation; and indeed, after
his enlargement, his life as an author virtually ceased. His 'Grace
Abounding' and the 'Holy War' were also written in prison. Bunyan lay
in Bedford Gaol, with a few intervals of precarious liberty, during not
less than twelve years; [217] and it was most probably to his prolonged
imprisonment that we owe what Macaulay has characterised as the finest
allegory in the world.

All the political parties of the times in which Bunyan lived, impr