John, author of the Pilgrim's Progress, was born at Elstow, near Bedford, in 1628. He was the son of a tinker, and in the early part of his life a great reprobate, having served as a soldier in the parliament army; but being at length deeply struck with a sense of his sins, he laid aside his profligate courses, became remarkable for his sobriety, and applied himself to obtain some degree of learning. About the year 1655 he was admitted a member of a Baptist congregation at Bedford, and was soon after chosen their preacher; but in 1660, having been seized and tried for presuming to preach, he was sentenced to perpetual banishment, and in the mean time committed to jail, where necessity obliged him to learn to make long-tagged thread-laces for his support; and, to add to his misery, he had a wife and several children, including a daughter who was blind. In this unjust and cruel confinement he was detained twelve years and a half; and during that time wrote many of his tracts; but he was at length discharged by the humane interposition of Dr Barlow. When King James's declaration for liberty of conscience was published, he was chosen pastor of a congregation at Bedford. He at length died of a fever at London, on the 31st of August 1688, aged sixty. He also wrote an allegory, called the Holy War. His Pilgrim's Progress has been translated into most European languages; and his works have been collected together, and printed in two volumes folio. "The characteristic peculiarity of the Pilgrim's Progress," says an able writer, "is, that it is the only work of its kind which possesses a strong human interest. The allegory of Bunyan has been read by many thousands with tears. This wonderful performance, while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it....In the wildest parts of Scotland the Pilgrim's Progress is the delight of the peasantry. In every nursery it is a greater favourite than Jack the Giant-killer. Every reader knows the straight and narrow path as well as he knows a road in which he has gone backward and forward a hundred times. This is the highest miracle of genius, that things which are not should be as though they were,—that the imaginations of one mind should become the perpetual recollections of another; and this miracle the tinker has wrought." (Edinburgh Review, vol. liv. p. 452.)