furnished a numerous and sympathetic congregation.  At one time a body of some sixty, who had met for worship at night in a neighbouring wood, were marched off to gaol, with their minister at their head.  But while all about him was in confusion, his spirit maintained its even calm, and he could at once speak the words of strength and comfort that were needed.  In the midst of the hurry which so many “newcomers occasioned,” writes the friend to whom we are indebted for the details of his prison life, “I have heard Mr. Bunyan both preach and pray with that mighty spirit of faith and plerophory of Divine assistance that has made me stand and wonder.”  These sermons addressed to his fellow prisoners supplied, in many cases, the first outlines of the books which, in rapid succession, flowed from his pen during the earlier years of his imprisonment, relieving the otherwise insupportable tedium of his close confinement.  Bunyan himself tells us that this was the case with regard to his “Holy City,” the first idea of which was borne in upon his mind when addressing “his brethren in the prison chamber,” nor can we doubt that the case was the same with other works of his.  To these we shall hereafter return.  Nor was it his fellow prisoners only who profited by his counsels.  In his “Life and Death of Mr. Badman,” he gives us a story of a woman who came to him when he was in prison, to confess how she had robbed her master, and to ask his help.  Hers was probably a representative case.  The time spared from his handicraft, and not employed in religious counsel and exhortation, was given to study and composition.  For this his confinement secured him the leisure which otherwise he would have looked for in vain.  The few books he possessed he studied indefatigably.  His library was, at least at one period, a very limited 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.