the subject of our sketch, the Tinker of Elstow. Of his high
merit as an author there is no longer any question. The Edinburgh Review
expressed the common sentiment of the literary world, when it declared
that the two great creative minds of the seventeenth century were those
which produced Paradise Lost and the Pilgrim's Progress.

THOMAS ELLWOOD.

Commend us to autobiographies! Give us the veritable notchings of
Robinson Crusoe on his stick, the indubitable records of a life long
since swallowed up in the blackness of darkness, traced by a hand the
very dust of which has become undistinguishable. The foolishest egotist
who ever chronicled his daily experiences, his hopes and fears, poor
plans and vain reachings after happiness, speaking to us out of the Past,
and thereby giving us to understand that it was quite as real as our
Present, is in no mean sort our benefactor, and commands our attention,
in spite of his folly. We are thankful for the very vanity which
prompted him to bottle up his poor records, and cast them into the great
sea of Time, for future voyagers to pick up. We note, with the deepest
interest, that in him too was enacted that miracle of a conscious
existence, the reproduction of which in ourselves awes and perplexes us.
He, too, had a mother; he hated and loved; the light from old-quenched
hearths shone over him; he walked in the sunshine over the dust of those
who had gone before him, just as we are now walking over his. These
records of him remain, the footmarks of a long-extinct life, not of mere
animal organism, but of a being like ourselves, enabling us, by studying
their hieroglyphic significance, to decipher and see clearly into the
mystery of existence centuries ago. The dead generations live again in
these old self-biographies. Incidentally, unintentionally, yet in the
simplest and most natural manner, they make us familiar with all the
phenomena of life in the bygone ages. We are brought in contact with
actual flesh-and-blood men and women, not the ghostly outline figures
which pass for such, in what is called History. The horn lantern of the
biographer, by the aid of which, with painful minuteness, he chronicled,
from day to day, his own outgoings and incomings, making visible to us
his pitiful wants, labors, trials, and tribulations of the stomach and of
the conscience, sheds, at times, a strong clear light upon
contemporaneous activities; what seemed before half fabulou