vidence that in the event of his death it would be well with
him, he girded up his soul with the reflection, that, as he suffered for
the word and way of God, he was engaged not to shrink one hair's breadth
from it. "I will leap," he says, "off the ladder blindfold into
eternity, sink or swim, come heaven, come hell. Lord Jesus, if thou wilt
catch me, do; if not, I will venture in thy name!"

The English revolution of the seventeenth century, while it humbled the
false and oppressive aristocracy of rank and title, was prodigal in the
development of the real nobility of the mind and heart. Its history is
bright with the footprints of men whose very names still stir the hearts
of freemen, the world over, like a trumpet peal. Say what we may of its
fanaticism, laugh as we may at its extravagant enjoyment of newly
acquired religious and civil liberty, who shall now venture to deny that
it was the golden age of England? Who that regards freedom above
slavery, will now sympathize with the outcry and lamentation of those
interested in the continuance of the old order of things, against the
prevalence of sects and schism, but who, at the same time, as Milton
shrewdly intimates, dreaded more the rending of their pontifical sleeves
than the rending of the Church? Who shall now sneer at Puritanism, with
the Defence of Unlicensed Printing before him? Who scoff at Quakerism
over the Journal of George Fox? Who shall join with debauched lordlings
and fat-witted prelates in ridicule of Anabaptist levellers and dippers,
after rising from the perusal of Pilgrim's Progress? "There were giants
in those days." And foremost amidst that band of liberty-loving and God-
fearing men,

"The slandered Calvinists of Charles's time,
Who fought, and won it, Freedom's holy fight,"

stands the subject of our sketch, the Tinker of Elstow. Of his high
merit as an author there is no longer any question. The Edinburgh Review
expressed the common sentiment of the literary world, when it declared
that the two great creative minds of the seventeenth century were those
which produced Paradise Lost and the Pilgrim's Progress.

THOMAS ELLWOOD.

Commend us to autobiographies! Give us the veritable notchings of
Robinson Crusoe on his stick, the indubitable records of a life long
since swallowed up in the blackness of darkness, traced by a hand the
very dust of which has become undistinguishable. The foolishest egotist
wh