Note 102 — MEMOIRS OF THE LIFE OF DAVID RITTENHOUSE; ANTERIOR TO HIS SETTLEMENT IN PHILADELPHIA.

.fm rend=t The writer of these memoirs well remembers to have heard Mr. Rittenhouse, when fully matured in years, speak of the pleasure he derived from the reading of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, while a youth. It is, certainly, no faint compliment to the “well-told tale” of that “ingenious dreamer,” that it engaged the attention of David Rittenhouse, even at a very early period of his life: and that compliment is greatly enhanced by the following beautiful invocation, addressed to the long-since departed spirit of the humble, yet persecuted, the pious, yet fanciful Bunyan, by the amiable Cowper:—

“Oh thou, whom, borne on fancy’s eager wing,

Back to the season of life’s happy spring,

I pleas’d remember, and, while mem’ry yet

Holds fast her office here, can ne’er forget;

Ingenious dreamer, in whose well-told tale

Sweet fiction and sweet truth alike prevail;

Whose hum’rous vein, strong sense, and simple style;

Witty, and well-employ’d, and, like thy Lord,

Speaking in parables his slighted word;

I name thee not, lest so despis’d a name

Should move a sneer at thy deserved fame:

Yet, ev’n in transitory life’s late day,

That mingles all my brown with sober gray,

Revere the man, whose Pilgrim marks the road,

And guides the Progress of the soul to God.”

Cowper’s Tirocinium.

The celebrated Benjamin Franklin too, in the account of his Life written by himself, informs us, that the Pilgrim’s Progress (which Franklin there, inadvertently, calls “Bunyan’s Voyages,”) was a favourite book of his, in his earlier years. “I have since learned,” says the Doctor, “that it has been translated into almost all the languages of Europe; and, next to the Bible, I am persuaded, it is one of the books which has had the greatest spread.”