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I should make a solemn pilgrimage to the little town of Eyam, in Derbyshire, where the Reverend Mr. Mompesson, the hero of the plague of 1665, and his wife, its heroine and its victim, lie buried. I should like to follow the traces of Cowper at Olney and of Bunyan at Elstow. I found an intense interest in the Reverend Mr.
It is best known from its connection with the immortal dreamer, John Bunyan, whose memory it now delights to honor. Far different was it in his lifetime, for he was confined for many years in Bedford Jail and it was during this imprisonment that he wrote his "Pilgrim's Progress." At Elstow, a mile from Bedford, we saw his cottage, a mean-looking little hut with only two rooms.
The royal garrisons yielded in quick succession; in 1646 the armies on both sides were disbanded, and the first act in the great national tragedy having come to a close, Bunyan returned to Elstow, and resumed his tinker's work at the paternal forge.
The parish church, so intimately connected with Bunyan's personal history, is a fragment of the church of the nunnery, with a detached campanile, or "steeple-house," built to contain the bells after the destruction of the central tower and choir of the conventual church. Few villages are so little modernized as Elstow.
Thus were blessings in rich abundance showered down upon the church by the instrumentality, in the first instance, of a woman that was a sinner, but most eminently by the Christian converse of a few poor but pious women. This poverty-stricken, ragged tinker was the son of a working mechanic at Elstow, near Bedford.
Elstow is a perpetual curacy or vicarage, worth at that time only £35 per annum! forming one of the discreditable anomalies of the church, in the division of its immense revenues. He has favoured us with the following description of it: 'The ring is of fine gold, very like in colour to that which has been brought into this country from California.
I. The author's parentage, imprisonment, times, and manner of his life and death, &c. II. Relations and observations upon his labours, &c. First, Our excellent author, by the abundant grace of God, Mr. John Bunyan, was born at Elstow, a mile side of Bedford, about the year 1628.
An old oaken bench, polished by the hands of thousands of visitors attracted to the village church by the fame of the tinker of Elstow, is traditionally shown as the seat he used to occupy when he "went to church twice a day, and that, too, with the foremost counting all things holy that were therein contained."
Hither, when he was old enough to walk to and fro, over the mile of road between Elstow and Bedford, the child was sent, if not to learn Aristotle and Plato, to learn at least 'to read and write according to the rate of other poor men's children. If religion was not taught at school, it was taught with some care in the cottages and farmhouses by parents and masters.
The reader need not go far to see young Bunyan. Perhaps there is near your dwelling an Elstow a quiet hamlet of some fifty houses sprinkled about in the picturesque confusion, and with the easy amplitude of space, which gives an old English village its look of leisure and longevity. And it is now verging to the close of the summer's day.
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