BUNHILL FIELDS Y common consent the two books which, BY next to the Bible, have been most widely 66 66 read by English-speaking people are " The Pilgrim's Progress " and "Robinson Crusoe." Of the first Coleridge declared that he knew no book he could so safely recommend as teaching and enforcing the whole saving truth;' Swift found in one of its chapters better entertainment and information than in long discourses on the will and intellect; Southey eulogized it as a clear stream of current English;" Lord Kames found its style akin to that of Homer with its " proper mixture of the dramatic and narrative;" and Macaulay concluded his judgment of its author with this oftcited tribute: "We are not afraid to say that, though there were many clever men in England during the latter half of the seventeenth century, there were only two great creative minds. One of these minds produced the 'Paradise Lost,' the other The Pilgrim's Progress.' Nor has "Robinson Crusoe " failed to win equal praise. Dr. Johnson placed it first among the three books he wished longer; Rousseau hailed it as the most complete "treatise on natural education; " Lamb declared it "delightful to all ranks and classes," equally at home in the kitchen and the libraries of the wealthiest and the most learned; Leslie Stephen credited its author with the gift of a tongue "to which no one could listen without believing every word that he uttered;" and Sir Walter Scott sums up the judgment of all by declaring that "there exists no book, either of instruction or entertainment, in the English language, which has been more generally read, and more universally admired." Yet the authors of these books, - books which have coloured the religious and imaginative thought of so many millions, John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe, have no memorial of any kind in Westminster Abbey. Of course their creed, alien as it was from that of the Church of England, rendered their burial in the Abbey impossible in the late seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. Nor, at that date, had England realized the abiding fame of the two writers. But it is different now. In this more charitable age the custodians of England's Valhalla do not enquire so closely into the religious faith of the nation's immortals, and that these two are secure of their place among those immortals no one doubts. Yet no memorial bust or votive tablet of either John Bunyan or Daniel Defoe has been set up in Westminster Abbey. Elsewhere, then, and not in the "long-drawn aisle" or beneath the "fretted vault" of stately Abbey or Cathedral, must the resting-place of these deathless writers be sought. Perhaps Bunyan and Defoe would have been well content that it should be so. Their nonconforming fellow-sleepers and stirring environment in Bunhill Fields are more in harmony with the lives they lived and the books they wrote than the austerity and aloofness of Westminster Abbey. Than those two places of sepulture it would be difficult to imagine burialplaces of greater contrast. The atmosphere of the Abbey, for all the humanizing influence of Poets' Corner, is redolent of courtliness, and power, and high achievement in senate and battlefield, and the overmastering presence of royalty; and over all there broods that sense of repose and detachment from actual life |