AN ADDRESS TO THE WIND. BY PEREGRINE PORTLY, ESQ. Air" Cease, rude Boreas, blustering railer!" STOP, Stop, Master Wind !-where on earth are you going, Spurring your courser so fast? Like a whale in the mud, how he's snorting and blowing !-I am sure he must founder at last. I wonder if ever you give him a baiting, Or get him new-shod by the smith? If you call for a sandwich to eat whilst you're waiting, For ever your route you are chopping and changing— What can be your purpose, thus racing and ranging Perchance you're the postman, and carry the letters If so, you can tell us some news of your betters- Perchance you're a wit, or a poor starving poet- Provided what genius you have you will shew it, I hate to have wits sit down to my table Who padlock their stores in their breast: They should pay for each glass with a pun, if they're able, And draw from the store that is best. I'm afraid you are mad, you make such a clatter- What a crash do I hear! What can be the matter? 'Tis only my chimney-pot dash'd all to pieces, Take a few drops of laudanum-do, and be quiet,— You will wear yourself out with such ranting and riot; Come, I'll lend you my chair, so soft and capacious, Your horse, too, shall feed, if not over-voracious; What an uproar was that! you are vastly uncivil, My fine stately elms like nine-pins are spinning, And now I can hear, by your whizzing and grinning, If I live, I will cite you, base Wind, 'fore the Master,- Why, you mocking old fiend! you ride faster and faster,— I'll shoot you with steam-gun, invented by Perkins, I'll pack up your bones, and send them in firkins, Posterity, then, o'er your relics shall wonder, Geologists, then, might write tracts at their pleasure, With the steam-gun I'll hit you, and down you will tumble What a fall will be there! what a terrible rumble! No storms will then be on the land or the ocean; And so will the ships: for old Wind, I've a notion, And if ships cannot move, why then I'm a-thinking, No brandy, no wine, at least that's worth drinking, Oh, what should I do without brandy and water, How cross I should be to my servants and daughter – Then roaring old Wind, play thy antics at pleasure, Since thou bringest home all our wines and our treasure, Only whistle me not a tune through my key-hole, Or at least with the works they have writ. Don't rattle the panes of my windows to vex me, And then we 'll jog on contented together, BUNYAN'S LIFE AND TIMES.* MR. PHILIP'S MERITS. THE opening remark of the author of this ill-concocted digest is curious : "Foreigners," says Mr. Philip, "have long wondered that a century and a half should have passed away without producing a Life of Bunyan. We ourselves can hardly explain this anomaly in our biographical literature." We beg to refer the elaborate wonderer to Grace Abounding, to Middleton's Evangelical Biography, to Wilson's History of Dissenting Churches, to Mr. Joseph Ivimey's Life of Bunyan, and lastly, to a life of Bunyan by that obscure individual, Dr. Southey. After this very curious introduction, Mr. Philip assigns the grave reasons under which he felt compelled to lavish more than ordinary research and assiduity on his good paper and print"ark for saving the remains" of his hero. These reasons are so dexterously interwoven with the author's antecedent works, that, by an act of legerdemain as beautiful as it is unrivalled, he kills two dogs with one stone; in ordinary prose he gives reasons for his work containing varied and vast research, and in the same breath places on the tapis his Experimental Guides for the Perplexed and Doubting. This is not all; he sweeps the Atlantic in his preliminary march, and proclaims to the world-that is to say, to his readers-that" on both sides the Atlantic, a circle of readers large enough for his ambition" is within his control. He tell us, also, with monstrous facetiousness, that his work" has more pitch than paint upon it;" that the suspicion of its having 66 creeping things" is incorrect; and that if there be detected in its crevices any such animalculæ, they are "not un-Catholic in their spirit." We earnestly implore Mr. Philip, whose patient researches we have no wish no disparage, to lay aside this egotistic and stilt-like style, fit only for a Punch and Judy show-box, and henceforth to usher into public view his useful publications, less by a flourish of unintelligible jargon and lofty vaunt ing, and more by a preface of good common sense. BUNYAN'S BOYHOOD. The boyhood of Bunyan seems to have been tainted by extraordinary vices, as well as characterised by powerful peculiarities. It is generally thought that his picture of Mr. Badman, is merely Bunyan in a metaphor: "From a child he was very bad. He used to be, as we say, the ringleader and master-sinner from a child; the inventor of bad words, and an example of bad actions. When a child, his parents scarce knew when to believe he spake true; he was also much given to pilfer and steal the things of his fellow-children, or any thing at a neighbour's house. Yea, what was his father's could not escape his fingers; all was fish that came to his net. You must understand me, of trifles; for being yet but a child, he attempted no great matter, especially at first. He was also greatly given to grievous cursing and swearing; he counted it a glory to swear and curse, and it was as natural to him as to eat, drink, and sleep." Notwithstanding these gross and vicious features of the boyhood of Bunyan, his memory was not destitute of valuable Scripture truths, nor his conscience of the Urim and Thummim, the lights and standards of truth and righteousness. This seems a very extraordinary fact. If at times he could plunge into daring excesses, he was also at times the subject of compunctions and remorse that laid him prostrate during their power and presence. He had, more or less, vague and confused apprehensions of solemn things, from early habituation to their contact, and these flashed at intervals upon his spirit with tremendous effect. The impressions likely to be produced on the mind of Bunyan, may be judged of from his composition of character, a powerful and far-stretching imagination, a retentive memory, many and active remnants of unextinguished moral sensibilities; these receiving into their bosom ill-defined inspirations from afar, worked them out into Bunyan's Life and Times, by Robert Philip, Author of Whitfield's Life and Times. London, 1859. Virtue, those grim and awful anticipations which occasionally overpowered with terror the boyhood of the author of the Pilgrim. "Even in my childhood," he says, "the Lord did scare and affrighten me with fearful dreams, and did terrify me with fearful visions. For often after I had spent this and the other day in sin, I have, in my bed, been greatly afflicted, while asleep, with the apprehension of devils and wicked spirits, who still, as I then thought, laboured to draw me away with them, of which I could never be rid; also, I was in these years greatly afflicted and troubled with the thoughts of the fearful torments of hell fire, still fearing that it would be my lot to be found at last among those devils and hellish fiends who are bound down with the chains and bonds of darkness unto the judgment of the great day. These things, I say, when I was but a child (about nine or ten years old), did so distress my soul, that then, in the midst of my many sports and childish vanities, amidst my vain companions, I was often cast down and afflicted in my mind therewith, yet could I not let go my sins. Yea, I was also then so overcome with despair of life and heaven, that I often wished there either had been no hell, or that I had been a devil, supposing they were only tormentors." Nor were these fearful imaginations made up like feverish dreams, partly of truth and partly of error, confined to his waking hours; night did not lull his terrors. His dreams were no less terrific, his visions by night were successive exhibitions of more than the handwriting on the walls of the palace of the King of Babylon. Altogether, the boyhood of Bunyan presents a very impressive spectacle of man amid the ruins of the fall; - wickedness enough to chain down to every evil and licentious course; light enough to see alike the features and the issue of moral sensibility; a conscience, resolute enough to pronounce a verdict of condemnation; and an imagination unusually vast, and, from its diseased state, prone to increase and dilate every foreboding of penalty and wrath, and to magnify and multiply the whole future to the vastness of ten thousand fearful phantasies. His younger days prognosticated a manhood of no ordinary mood and matériel. Ilis were ་་ ་ BUNYAN A SOLDIER. We next find our hero, not in the Royal army, where one would imagine he must have found congenial fellowship, but, strangely enough, in the ranks of the Parliament. The character of the battalions among whom Bunyan enrolled his name was utterly Whatever the reverse of his own. 66 vices they indulged, they did not patronise profane swearing and openly licentious conduct. "The private soldiers," says Hume, not a partial judge, employed their vacant hours in prayer, in perusing the Scriptures, in ghostly conferences, wherein they compared the progress of their souls in grace, and mutually stimulated each other to further advances in the great work of their salvation. When they were marching to battle, the whole field resounded with psalms and spiritual songs adapted to the occasion, as with instruments of military music, and every man endeavoured to drown the sense of present danger in the prospect of that crown of glory which was set before him. In so holy a cause wounds were esteemed meritorious, death martyrdom; and the hurry and dangers of action, instead of banishing their pious visions, rather strove to impress their minds more highly with them." It was in the camp, and amid the campaigns of Cromwell and the Parliamentary forces that Bunyan stored his mind with the phraseology, the tactics, and the figures of the Holy War, and of portions of his Pilgrim. In after-years, and amid the solitude of his cell, Naseby and the siege of Leicester presented their sanguinary scenes; and Fairfax, and Ireton, and Skippon, and Cromwell, furnished to the imagination of the writer, the outlines of the Christian heroes of his noble allegories. We believe that Bunyan was by no means anxious to revive before the public eye the achievements of his military life. These were not sources of laurels to him. He clearly preferred allegorical to actual combats. A few acknowledgments of Bunyan's politeness in preferring others to himself in the hour of danger and of difficulty, may be gathered from those sketches of his life which have been left behind him. At one skirmish, be some another man voluntarily thrust himself (Bunyan, in the circumstances of the case, manifesting no reluctance) into his place.”—Life from the Museum Śketch. "When I was a soldier," says Bunyan, "I, with others, was drawn out to go to such a place to besiege it; but when I was just ready to go, one of the company desired to go in my room, to which, when I had consented (astonishing courtesy !), he took my place; and coming to the siege, as he stood sentinel, he was shot in the head and died." The illustrious Cicero was a coward, though a first-rate orator; and Bunyan was no hero, though the ablest limner of heroic exploits. His experience, however, ripened him for his writing; and had he not seen the tacts of Cromwell, he might have failed in his portrait of the Holy War. He says, or rather sings, in the Holy War: "I saw the prince's armed men come down By troops, by thousands, to besiege the town; I saw the captains, heard the trumpets sound, And how his forces covered all the ground; Yea, how they set themselves in battle 'ray, I shall remember to my dying day. I saw the mounts cast up against the town, And how the slings were placed to beat it down; I heard the stones fly whizzing by my ears: What's longer kept in mind, than got in fears? I heard them fall, and saw what work they made, And how old Mars did cover with his shade." BUNYAN'S MARRIAGE. It appears from the record of Bunyan's life in the British Museum, that it was not only his own inclination, but the advice of his friends, that he should look out for a wife. If he displayed cowardice in the field of battle, he betrayed a dash of covetousness in his matrimonial crusades. He made every exertion to get a rich wife, but because none of the rich would yield to his solicitations, he found himself constrained to marry one without any fortune. The deductions of his biographer from this fact are very curi "He was boisterous, and perhaps turbulent, but not harsh nor vindictive; had he been so, no decent woman could have been tempted to marry him, for he had literally nothing in the world but the tools of his craft. In like manner, had he been a sensualist, his friends could not have induced a very virtuous woman, born of good, honest, godly parents, to have him. There must, therefore, notwithstanding all his faults, have been something loveable about him. The very fact that they had not so much between them as a dish or a spoon,' proves that he must have had some en. dearing quality. It proves, also, that she had but little prudence, even if she married him for the express purpose of mending him." Notwithstanding this reasoning in a circle, the biographer of Bunyan is deeply in love with Bunyan's wife; he dwells" on her influence with a fondness bordering on extravagance." We candidly admit that few wives have displayed greater skill, deeper intimacy with the heart of man, or more perseverance and strenuous patience in order to reclaim and reform a husband. Her whole dowry consisted of a couple of theological volumes, and a memory stored with the maxims and prescriptions of a pious and excellent father. A rich wife would have ruined him; an intellectual, but unsanctified wife, would have irritated him; a stupid wife would have been a domestic plea for his devotedness to loose and disorderly habits; but the prudent, pious, and patient Mrs. Bunyan, put forth a plastic power upon the habits and feelings of the swearing tinker, which ultimately, under the benediction of God, educed the Pilgrim's Progress from the most hopeless of men. BUNYAN'S REFORMATION. When Bunyan began to sober down to the habits of decorum and exterior respectablity, he indicated one characteristic not unfrequently found in such circumstances; viz. a veneration approximating to worship for the mere externals of devotion. In reading the following account of his own experience at this crisis, let it be borne in mind that the worship which our hero idolized was the Presbyterian service-book, or Directory, and not the Liturgy of the Church of England. In other words, as will be evinced, he became a Presbyterian Puseyite; thereby demon |