me
beneath the title-page, in a large and stout print-hand. Under some of
the woodcuts he has inserted a few rhymes, which are undoubtedly his own
composition; and which, though much in the manner of the verses that
were printed under the illustrations of his own _Pilgrim's Progress_,
when that work was first adorned with cuts, (verses worthy of such
embellishments,) are very much worse than even the worst of those.
Indeed, it would not be possible to find specimens of more miserable
doggerel.

Here is one of the Tinker's tetrasticks, penned in the margin, beside
the account of Gardiner's death:--

"The blood, the blood that he did shed
Is falling one his one head;
And dredfull it is for to see
The beginers of his misere."

One of the signatures bears the date of 1662; but the verses must
undoubtedly have been some years earlier, before the publication of his
first tract. These curious inscriptions must have been Bunyan's first
attempts in verse: he had, no doubt, found difficulty enough in tinkering
them to make him proud of his work when it was done; otherwise, he would
not have written them in a book which was the most valuable of all his
goods and chattels. In later days, he seems to have taken this book for
his art of poetry. His verses are something below the pitch of Sternhold
and Hopkins. But if he learnt there to make bad verses, he entered fully
into the spirit of its better parts, and received that spirit into as
resolute a heart as ever beat in a martyr's bosom.[2]

[2] Southey's Life of John Bunyan.

* * * * *

LITERARY LOCALITIES.

Leigh Hunt pleasantly says:--"I can no more pass through Westminster,
without thinking of Milton; or the Borough, without thinking of Chaucer
and Shakspeare; or Gray's Inn, without calling Bacon to mind; or
Bloomsbury-square, without Steele and Akenside; than I can prefer
brick and mortar to wit and poetry, or not see a beauty upon it beyond
architecture in the splendour of the recollection. I once had duties to
perform which kept me out late at night, and severely taxed my health
and spirits. My path lay through a neighbourhood in which Dryden lived,
and though nothing could be more common-place, and I used to be tired to
the heart and soul of me, I never hesitated to go a little out of the
way, purely that I might pass through Gerard-street, and so give myself
the shadow of a pleasant thought."

* * *