wealth away,' and at last parted 'as poor as howlets.'

Then came the end. Badman was still in middle life, and had naturally
a powerful constitution; but his 'cups and his queans' had undermined
his strength. Dropsy came, and gout, with worse in his bowels, and 'on
the top of them all, as the captain of the men of death that came to
take him away,' consumption. Bunyan was a true artist, though he knew
nothing of the rules, and was not aware that he was an artist at all.
He was not to be tempted into spoiling a natural story with the
melodramatic horrors of a sinner's deathbed. He had let his victim
'howl' in the usual way, when he meant him to recover. He had now
simply to conduct him to the gate of the place where he was to receive
the reward of his iniquities. It was enough to bring him thither still
impenitent, with the grave solemnity with which a felon is taken to
execution.

'As his life was full of sin,' says Mr. Wiseman, 'so his death was
without repentance. He had not, in all the time of his sickness, a
sight and a sense of his sins; but was as much at quiet as if he had
never sinned in his life: he was as secure as if he had been sinless
as an angel. When he drew near his end, there was no more alteration
in him than what was made by his disease upon his body. He was the
selfsame Mr. Badman still, not only in name, but in condition, and
that to the very day of his death and the moment in which he died.
There seemed not to be in it to the standers by so much as a strong
struggle of nature. He died like a lamb, or, as men call it, like a
chrisom child, quietly and without fear.'

To which end of Mr. Badman Bunyan attaches the following remarks: 'If
a wicked man, if a man who has lived all his days in notorious sin,
dies quietly, his quiet dying is so far from being a sign of his being
saved that it is an incontestable proof of his damnation. No man can
be saved except he repents; nor can he repent that knows not that he
is a sinner: and he that knows himself to be a sinner will, I warrant
him, be molested for his knowledge before he can die quietly. I am no
admirer of sick-bed repentance; for I think verily it is seldom good
for anything. But I see that he that hath lived in sin and profaneness
all his days, as Badman did, and yet shall die quietly, that is,
without repentance steps in between his life and his death, is
assuredly gone to hell. When God would show the greatness of his anger
against sin and s