ted one,--"the least
and the best library," writes a friend who visited him in prison, "that I
ever saw, consisting only of two books--the Bible, and Foxe's 'Book of
Martyrs.'" "But with these two books," writes Mr. Froude, "he had no
cause to complain of intellectual destitution." Bunyan's mode of
composition, though certainly exceedingly rapid,--thoughts succeeding one
another with a quickness akin to inspiration,--was anything but careless.
The "limae labor" with him was unsparing. It was, he tells us, "first
with doing, and then with undoing, and after that with doing again," that
his books were brought to completion, and became what they are, a mine of
Evangelical Calvinism of the richest ore, entirely free from the narrow
dogmatism and harsh predestinarianism of the great Genevan divine; books
which for clearness of thought, lucidity of arrangement, felicity of
language, rich even if sometimes homely force of illustration, and
earnestness of piety have never been surpassed.

Bunyan's prison life when the first bitterness of it was past, and habit
had done away with its strangeness, was a quiet and it would seem, not an
unhappy one. A manly self-respect bore him up and forbade his dwelling
on the darker features of his position, or thinking or speaking harshly
of the authors of his durance. "He was," writes one who saw him at this
time, "mild and affable in conversation; not given to loquacity or to
much discourse unless some urgent occasion required. It was observed he
never spoke of himself or his parents, but seemed low in his own eyes. He
was never heard to reproach or revile, whatever injury he received, but
rather rebuked those who did so. He managed all things with such
exactness as if he had made it his study not to give offence."

According to his earliest biographer, Charles Doe, in 1666, the year of
the Fire of London, after Bunyan had lain six years in Bedford gaol, "by
the intercession of some interest or power that took pity on his
sufferings," he enjoyed a short interval of liberty. Who these friends
and sympathisers were is not mentioned, and it would be vain to
conjecture. This period of freedom, however, was very short. He at once
resumed his old work of preaching, against which the laws had become even
more stringent during his imprisonment, and was apprehended at a meeting
just as he was about to preach a sermon. He had given out his text,
"Dost thou believe on the Son of God?" (John