a king's ship before he was twenty, and even at that early age he had resolved to win for himself an enduring fame. What was to impede his upward course? Had he not known the begrimmed and beaten cabin-boy rise to the command of a squadron ? And why should not he, with every advantage to assist him, rise to even a higher dignity? What range for his ambition could be greater than that which opened before him? Spain and Holland fretted at the growing maritime power of England. Their navies must be met and stricken down on the open main, and when these were destroyed, the pirates of the Spanish and Mediterranean sea-board would give him ample employment. At this period the conflict between the King and his Parliament was fiercely waged; and Penn, carefully calculating the chances, cast his lot in with the popular party. Known as a bold and skilful officer, he was immediately appointed to the command of a twenty-eight gun ship, and ordered to cruise off the coast of Ireland, and to assist in the blockade of that island. He was ordered to sail on October 12, 1644. In the previous year, he had been married to a lovely Dutch girl, the daughter of a rich trader of Rotterdam. As his wife was hourly expecting her confinement, Captain Penn delayed to weigh anchor till the child was born. After some anxious waiting, his child was born on Oct. 14th- a robust and healthy boy,' who was named William Penn. Assured of the safety of his wife and child, Penn put to sea. He rose from rank to rank, till he obtained command, first of a squadron, and then of a fleet. Always a trimmer, and sometimes hardly saving his honour in his time-service and double-dealing, Admiral Penn managed to retain the friendship and confidence both of the Protector and of the exiled Stuarts. Guilty occasionally of meanness, and even of treachery, he served the interests of both parties till the star of Oliver went down; and when Charles II. came to the throne, he took the politic admiral into his especial favour. False and fickle as the Stuarts were, even to a proverb, cruel to their enemies and treacherous to their friends, negligent and forgetful where they owed deepest gratitude, the royal brothers never forgot their obligations to Penn, but remained constant in their friendship both to him and to

his son.

Retired from active service, and full of honours, the admiral, when he could earn no more distinctions for himself, was intensely ambitious for his son. High in favour with the pleasure-loving king, and possessed of considerable resources, what would he not do for his son? and as the restored monarch had held out the hope of a peerage to his faithful admiral, the son of so great a hope, as he was also a youth of considerable promise, must be trained as became the heir of boundless distinctions. Worldly, cunning, and ambitious, the father entered his son as a gentleman-commoner at Christ Church, Oxford, and at a time, too, when great genius and worth presided in that university. The Dean of Christ Church at that time was the illustrious Dr. John Owen-Cromwell's Dean-colossal in learning, democratic in opinion, and good at heart. Such a man became, from his very qualities, a mark for the hatred and for the revenge of the per

fidious roysterer who wore the English crown; and a royal order speedily ejected him from his chair, and thus quenched the greatest luminary in those halls of learning. At the time William Penn entered the university, South was its public orator-the man whose sermons, at a subsequent period, presented to the world the strange combination of graceful oratory with vulgar invective; and there, too, was another, whose fame, coeval at least with that of the dean, shall survive when that of the eloquent preacher is forgotten-John Locke, philosopher and patriot, chief of gifted men.

It would seem that William Penn was a diligent and successful student; and there, and afterwards at Saumur, he became familiar, not merely with the literary glories of Greece and Rome, but also with the most important languages of modern Europe. That Divine Providence, which ever directs to the happiest issues our mundane economy, gradually prepares his instruments for their destined use; and under that unerring supervision, William Penn received just that training which fitted him for his noble after employ. In one of the terms spent by young Penn at Oxford, Thomas Loe, a poor man in that city, began to preach the new dogmas of George Fox:-that form and vestment are not the essentials, but the accidents in Divine service; that such service, in its true nature, is yielded, not by the lip, but by the heart; that what the world calls fashion, with its evershifting pomp and show, is a delusion and a folly, absurd in theory, and sinful in practice; that a man is great as he is good and true, not as he is rich or titled; that before the Everlasting all men are equal; that men should be free to worship, as they are free to think; and that the Great Father, who gave life to all, has placed in the heart of each of his children a divine light, a thought of his own mind, an unerring witness of his truth, to guide the pilgrims of time to everlasting rest and joy. This was a new doctrine, startling to a corrupt and formal age, when men confounded the accidental and the essential in religion a doctrine dangerous to all government-ecclesiastics, and to those who traded in the spiritual. But there was life in this doctrine, and it got itself a strong grasp on many minds. Ever eager to learn a new truth, young Penn hastened to hear this innovatory dogma, though preached by a blundering artizan; for had not the great truths of Christianity itself been preached by a fisherman and a tentmaker? and why should not an Oxford mechanic, in an age of dreamers, imagine himself to be taught of the Lord?

Ecclesiastics are essentially the same in every age-impatient of innovation, fretful against reform, and ever vigilant of their dignity and its perquisites. With eagle eye the college authorities marked young Penn. He is cited before them, and fined for attendance in an assembly, to which an insane declaimer vociferated his fanatical absurdities. He corresponded with Dr. Owen, taking counsel of that great man; and whether encouraged by his advice or not, he resolved to throw off the college-gown as a relic of Popery, or, more probably— as the illustrious Gale would teach-of paganism. This resolution led him to some errors and impetuosities. For his irregularities he was

again cited before the tribunal which had so lately mulcted him, and by them was formally and irrevocably expelled the university. The admiral, stung and mortified, first by the Nonconformity, and then by the expulsion of his son, resolved to cure him of his mind's disease; and with this view sent him to finish his education in France. Louis XIV. held at that time a brilliant court, adorned by the beauty and rank, and by the learning and genius of his land. There Penn formed the friendship of Algernon Sidney; and there, too, the youth forgot, in the maze of a splendid and voluptuous society, the teachings of Loe, and the sternness of his Oxford Nonconformity. His father, a commissioner of the navy, and also, by reason of the Dutch war, raised to the rank of Great-captain-commander, was delighted to see, when his son had returned to England, that he had forgotten those austere and offensive doctrines, the embracing of which had cut short his college-course. The admiral entered him as a student at Lincoln's Inn, that the time might be well employed till the father's dazzling dreams were realized. But his plans were destined to be thwarted; for soon there fell on the metropolis a dark and terrible visitation, which revived in young Penn's heart those religious principles which French gaiety had failed to destroy. Either conveyed to the city by ships from the Levant, or engendered by the filth, and among the crowded dwellings of its poor inhabitants, the plague broke out in London. In a city full of intemperance, and whose narrow streets, and densely-peopled lanes, harboured dirt and misery, the fell disease spread with fearful rapidity. Hale men left their homes at early morning, and returned no more; and before their wondering families had time to seek for their absent kinsmen, the destroyer swept them also away. The markets were forsaken; grass grew in the streets; the ships, deserted by the mariners, who perished or fled away, swung idly in the pool; the city was filled with doleful cries from enthusiasts and mourners; the cross, the fatal sign of infection, was on nearly every door; ten thousand citizens died in one day; during every hour, the dead carts bore to the common pit of burial heaps of corpses indiscriminately hurled in; fear destroyed natural affection; men fled from their diseased kindred as from serpents, and London showed like a city of the dead. At such a time thoughts which young Penn could neither resist nor quench, filled his soul. His worldly-minded father, with but one idea-that his son should one day attain to eminence-in order that these sombre reflections might not turn that son from a splendid goal, sent him to Ireland, with letters of introduction to the viceroy, the Duke of Ormonde. There, military adventures, for a season, removed from the young man's mind what his father designated that hateful gloom;' and the viceroy wrote to congratulate the happy admiral on the possession of so promising a son.

The elder Penn had received from the Crown the gift of Shangarry castle, and there, in order to superintend the newly-acquired manor, William Penn resided. But how futile is the endeavour of a mortal to change his destiny; or, in more enlightened phrase, how abortive is the attempt of man to oppose the arrangements of Him who worketh

according to his own will,' and whose government is ever conducted to the wisest and happiest results! So it happened, that during one of his visits to Cork, he received information that Thomas Loe, whom he had listened to with admiration at Oxford, was to preach in the city on a certain night. Penn went, and heard once more, from that earnest pleader, of the faith that overcomes the world-of the vanity of all earthly things-and of the soul's high destiny when present scenes have past away. The strong word, spoken by the lips of this man, overcame him. From that night he renounced all that, in this world, men call great and good; and he resolved to cast in his lot with the humble men who esteemed the reproach of Christ' above earthly peace and dignity. With all the zeal of a new convert, the young tenant of Shangarry castle attended the meetings of the despised Sect, till on one evening the soldiery burst in upon the assembly, and carried Penn and his companions to prison. His father, to whom the sad intelligence was speedily conveyed, knew no bounds in his rage. He summoned the deluded youth, as he deemed him, to London, took him home, and demanded of him that he should at once abjure the creed he had adopted, and the fanatics, as they were styled, to whom he had attached himself. But his son was captive to the truth he had embraced, and that truth he could not, would not deny. The admiral, accustomed to have instant obedience at his word of command, was so enraged and disgusted with his son, that he immediately expelled him his home.

If we just glance at the period in which Quakerism arose, we shall find that it was an age fruitful in fanatics. During the Commonwealth, when there was no limit to liberty of opinion, every new day saw its new religious theory. The human mind, so long restrained by the tyranny of Laud and the merciless ecclesiastics of his time, when freedom of thought was proclaimed by the victorious Parliamentarians, oscillated to the extreme of religious licentiousness. The streets were filled with fanatics. In almost every market-place some new sectary brawled his visionary creed. It was an age of contradictories. In those ancient buildings in which the grey fathers of the English Church had preached the divinity at once of the Book of Common Prayer and of the right of kings, enthusiastic soldiers, fresh from the study of Ezekiel or Habakkuk, proclaimed the wildest republicanism and their contempt of government. No wonder, therefore, amid so many fanaticisms, that Quakerism was suspected. Its rise had been peculiar. George Fox, a rude shoemaker in Leicestershire, had become troubled at the thought of sin, temptation, and eternity; he had heard, or fancied he had heard, a mystic voice which called him from his employ to revolve the great questions of man's loss or gain in the everlasting future; and fancying himself summoned to preach to men on these grave topics-an idea by no means strange in an age when enthusiasts abounded-he went forth to breast the obloquy of the world, and to preach against creed and priest, sin and Satan. Though some of his opinions were vague, and some of his objections utterly childish, George Fox was one of Nature's great creations-a man born to move

his age, and to give a new and healthy impulse to human activities. Quakerism was not merely a new system of theology, but it was also subversive of established economies. It was the old republican spirit revived in the form of it most dangerous to existing authorities; and it was, therefore, peculiarly objectionable to the established powers in Church and State. Bishops frowned upon it; mayors threw it into prison; but it grew, though the priests hotly persecuted it; and the civil powers soon learnt and we owe it chiefly to Quakerism that potentates have acquired it-that a healthy thought gets strength in proportion as it is decried and resisted.

It was to the opinions of this man that William Penn had become a convert. After a few months of absence from home, the stern admiral permitted his son to return to it; and there, in the quiet of his family, he wrote several works in defence of his new opinions. He wrote so pungently and well, that he soon became obnoxious to the bishops; and some one of those meek and lowly descendants of the Hebrew fishermen obtained a Secretary of State's warrant against the young disputant, and he was arrested and lodged in the Tower. There it seemed as if the old martyr-spirit, which had pervaded the hearts of many noble prisoners within those dreary walls, inspired Penn; and he wrote his book entitled, 'No Cross, no Crown,' and which is still esteemed by the British public. He was a man on whom threats had no influence; and, as he told his friends, the Tower was to him the worst argument in the world.' The admiral, who well knew how to estimate moral courage, was charmed by the stern heroism of his son, and resolved to use his influence with his friend and patron, the Duke of York, to procure his release. At the duke's request, William Penn was immediately discharged from prison; and he at once repaired to Ireland, where he spent several months in the management of the Shangarry property; in endeavouring to obtain the freedom of many imprisoned Quakers; and in the study of those truths which give life and liberty to the soul.

6

It will be well for us to glance hastily at the state of English society at this period. When Cromwell slept in death, the principles of which he was the champion were put in abeyance. Men began to lust after their old idols, which the Protector had overthrown. The drowsy or half-barbarous squires, who had fretted under what they considered his spiritual tyranny, longed for those days wherein no villager, farmer, or parson, had refused to be drunk, as often as he could, on old brown ale; when fairs and wakes encouraged at once trade and vice; and when the droning vicar or curate inflicted on his parishioners no homily by the hour-glass, but speedily and gladly dismissed a yawning congregation to cricket or to bowls. So when Charles II. sat in the seat of the departed Oliver, and inaugurated the reign of lust and drunkenness, the squires and Anglicans rejoiced with exceeding joy. Now, sottish priests could hold their livings without fear of the Triers,' and in spite of sombre Presbyterian or lank Independent; and the squire, without the fear of clerical reproof before his eyes, could revel in his October, and debauch the village girls.