more modern orthography, except in special characteristic cases. This course has been fully authorized by the fact that there is scarcely a single instance where in some part of the work the modern spelling may not be found. To preserve the old orthography would therefore have been mere pedantry.

The same rule has been adopted with regard to capital letters and punctuation. In both Bunyan was lawless and capricious. No good end was to be served in retaining an erroneous usage, and it has been discarded without question.

Manifest errors have also been corrected without scruple.

The entirely unauthorized corrections of later editors, by which Bunyan's text has been tampered with, have been discarded, and the original readings restored. Such are 'wizard' for 'witch' (p. 97, 1. 21); 'duty' for 'day' (p. 128, l. 19); the thoughts' for 'our thoughts' (p. 133, l. 28); 'palace' for 'place' (p. 169, 1. 1); 'prize' for 'price' (ib. 1. 21); sunshiny' for 'sunshine' (p. 106, l. 17); and as the most notable instance of arbitrary alteration 'Mordecai' for 'Heman' (p. 120, l. 8).

Of the other work included in this volume, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, little has to be said. It has a twofold value, biographical and experimental. As an autobiography, provoking as are its omissions and scanty its references to any events but such as bore on Bunyan's spiritual life, it is of the highest interest. Without it we should have known very little of Bunyan's early life, and have lost almost all clue to his inner history. The existence of the Pilgrim's Progress would have been an almost insoluble problem to us. How much we are indebted to this memoir for our knowledge of Bunyan as a man, and of the circumstances of his life, may be estimated by comparing our acquaintance with his earlier and later years. When he ceased to write no one took up the pen, and beyond two or three anecdotes we are absolutely ignorant of all that happened between his enlargement from prison and his death.

Its value as a work of experimental religion is more restricted. The number of those who can read with profit Bunyan's minute and graphic history of his terrible spiritual conflict is not large, especially among the young-in whom it is more calculated to nourish morbid imaginations and a dangerous habit of self-introspection than to forward the quiet growth of the religious life.

To some it will be perfectly unintelligible. Others will regard Bunyan's varied experiences as the hallucinations of a disordered intellect. Those only-and their number will always be few— who have felt the power of such fierce temptations themselves, and have passed through the same alternations of light and darkness, of hope and despair, are capable of fully appreciating it. Bunyan tells us in his title-page that it was published 'for the support of the weak and tempted people of God.' Those for whom it was intended will ever find in it a message of comfort and strength.

We learn from the title-page that Grace Abounding was 'written by his own hand in prison,' where its composition must have whiled away many tedious hours during the early years of his incarceration. It was first published in 1666, the year of the Great Fire, in the sixth year of his imprisonment. It at once became popular, and the year of its issue saw several editions called for.

As a literary work Grace Abounding is worthy of the author of the Pilgrim's Progress. It is written in the same simple nervous English, neither vulgar nor stilted; and abounds like it in choice bits of old English, racy metaphors, and graphic imagery. Its editing was far more careful than that of the Pilgrim's Progress twelve years later. The earliest editions extant show very few of the gross faults of spelling and solecisms in grammar which deform the first issues of that work. What Bunyan's literary compositions were before they passed under the hands of the reviser is shown by the marginal notes penned by him on the pages of his Acts and Monuments during his imprisonment. The first editor who prepared the Pilgrim's Progress for the press can have been but little above Bunyan himself in education. The reviser of Grace Abounding must have been a man of greater literary power. It may be remarked that the quotations from Scripture in this work are given from memory. Mr. Offor, in his otherwise faithful reprint, unwisely brought them into conformity with the Authorized Version. In this edition the original form has been restored.