two small volumes, Baily's
_Practice of Piety_ and Dent's _The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven_. The
first is a very complicated and elaborate statement of Christian dogma,
which Bunyan passes by with the scant praise, "Wherein I also found some
things that were somewhat pleasing to me." The other is a much more
vital production. Even to this day it is an immensely interesting piece
of reading. It consists of conversations between various men who stand
for types of worldling, ignoramus, theologian, etc., and there are very
clear traces of it in the _Pilgrim's Progress_, especially in the talks
between Bunyan's pilgrims and the man Ignorance.

Another book which played a large part in Bunyan's life was the short
biography of Francis Spira, an Italian, who had died shortly before
Bunyan's time. Spira had been a Protestant lawyer in Italy, but had
found it expedient to abate the open profession of Protestantism with
which he began, and eventually to transfer his allegiance to the Roman
Church. The biography is for the most part an account of his death-bed
conversation, which lasted a long time, since his illness was even more
of the mind than of the body. It is an extremely ghastly account of a
morbid and insane melancholia. It was the fashion of the time to take
such matters spiritually rather than physically, and we read that many
persons went to his death-bed and listened to his miserable cries and
groanings in the hope of gaining edification for their souls. How the
book came into Bunyan's hands no one can tell, but evidently he had
found it in English translation, and many of the darkest parts of _Grace
Abounding_ are directly due to it, while the Man in the Iron Cage quotes
the very words of Spira.

Another book which Bunyan had read was Luther's _Commentary on the
Galatians_. The present writer possesses a copy of that volume dated
1786, at the close of which there are fourteen pages, on which long
lists of names are printed. The names are those of weavers,
shoe-makers, and all sorts of tradesmen in the western Scottish towns
of Kilmarnock, Paisley, and others of that neighbourhood, who had
subscribed for a translation of the commentary that they might read it
in their own tongue. This curious fact reminds us that the book had
among the pious people of our country an audience almost as enthusiastic
as Bunyan himself was. Another of his books, and the only one quoted by
name in the _Pilgrim's Progress_ or _Grace Aboun