to his province. His claim, arising from conquest and pos session, had the informal assent of the king and the privy council, and had extended even to the upper Swedish settlements. It was not difficult to obtain from the duke a release of his claim on Pennsylvania; and, after much negotiation, in August, the lower province was granted by two deeds of feoffment. From the forty-third degree of latitude to the Atlantic, the western and southern banks of Delaware river and bay were under the dominion of William Penn.

Every arrangement for a voyage to his province being finished, in a beautiful letter he took leave of his family. His wife, who was the love of his youth, he reminded of his impoverishment in consequence of his public spirit, and wrote: "Live low and sparingly till my debts be paid." Yet for his children he adds: "Let their learning be liberal; spare no cost, for by such parsimony all is lost that is saved." "Let my children be husbandmen and housewives." Friends in England gave their farewell at parting with "the innocence and tenderness of the child that has no guile."

After a long passage, rendered gloomy by frequent death among the passengers, many of whom had in England been his immediate neighbors, on the twenty-seventh day of October, 1682, William Penn landed at Newcastle.

The son and grandson of naval officers, his thoughts had from boyhood been directed to the ocean; the conquest of Jamaica by his father early familiarized his imagination with the New World, and in the university of Oxford, at the age of seventeen, he indulged in visions, of which America was the scene. Bred in the school of Independency, he had, while hardly twelve years old, learned to listen to the voice of God in his soul; and at Oxford, where his studies included the writings of the Greek philosophers, especially of Plato, the words of a Quaker preacher so touched his heart that, in 1661, he was fined and afterward expelled for non-conformity. His father, bent on subduing his enthusiasm, beat him and turned him into the streets, to choose between poverty with a pure conscience, or fortune with obedience. But how could the hot anger of a petulant sailor continue against his oldest son? It was in the days of Descartes that, to complete

his education, William Penn received a father's permission to visit the continent.

From the excitements and the instruction of travel the young exile turned aside to the college at Saumur, where, under the guidance of the gifted and benevolent Amyrault, his mind was trained in the severities of Calvinism, as tempered by the spirit of universal love.

In 1664, Penn was just crossing the Alps into Piedmont when the appointment of his father to the command of a British squadron in the naval war with Holland compelled his return to the care of the estates of the family. In London the travelled student of Lincoln's Inn, while diligent in gaining a knowledge of English law, was yet esteemed a most modish fine gentleman.

Having thus strengthened his understanding by the learning of Oxford, the religion and philosophy of the French Huguenots and France, and the study of the laws of England; being of engaging manners, and so skilled in the use of the sword that he easily disarmed an antagonist; of great natural vivacity and gay good humor-the career of wealth and preferment was open before him through the influence of his father and the ready favor of his sovereign. But his mind was already imbued with "a deep sense of the vanity of the world, and the irreligiousness of its religions."

In 1666, on a journey in Ireland, William Penn heard his old friend Thomas Loe speak of the faith that overcomes the world; the undying fires of enthusiasm at once blazed up within him, and he renounced every hope for the path of integrity. It is a path into which, says Penn, "God, in his everlasting kindness, guided my feet in the flower of my youth, when about two-and-twenty years of age." And in the autumn of that year he was in jail for the crime of listening to the voice of conscience. "Religion," such was his remonstrance to the viceroy of Ireland, "is my crime and my innocence; it makes me a prisoner to malice, but my own freeman."

After his enlargement, returning to England, he encountered bitter mockings and scornings, the invectives of the priests, the strangeness of all his old companions; it was

noised about in the fashionable world, as an excellent jest, that "William Penn was a Quaker again, or some very melancholy thing;" and, in 1667, his father, in anger, turned him penniless out of doors.

The outcast, saved from extreme indigence by a mother's fondness, became an author, and, in 1668, announced to princes, priests, and people, that he was one of the despised, afflicted, and forsaken Quakers. Repairing to court with his hat on, he sought to engage the duke of Buckingham in favor of liberty of conscience, claimed from those in authority better things for dissenters than stocks and whips and dungeons and banishments, and was urging the cause of freedom with importunity, when he himself, in the heyday of early life, was consigned to a long and close imprisonment in the Tower. His offence was heresy: the bishop of London menaced him with imprisonment for life unless he would recant. "My prison shall be my grave," answered Penn. The kind-hearted Charles II. sent the humane and candid Stillingfleet to calm the enthusi"The Tower," such was Penn's message to the king, "is to me the worst argument in the world." In vain did Stillingfleet urge the motive of royal favor and preferment. The inflexible young man demanded freedom of Arlington, "as the natural privilege of an Englishman;" club-law, he argued with the minister, may make hypocrites; it never can make Conscience needs no mark of public allowance. It is not like a bale of goods that is to be forfeited unless it has the stamp of the custom-house. After losing his freedom for about nine months, his constancy commanded the respect and recovered the favor of his father, and his prison-door was opened by the intercession of his father's friend, the duke of York.

ast.

The Quakers, exposed to judicial tyranny, sought a barrier against their oppressors by narrowing the application of the common law, and restricting the right of judgment to the jury. Scarcely had Penn been at liberty a year, when, after the intense intolerance of "the conventicle act," he was arraigned, in 1670, for having spoken at a Quaker meeting. "Not all the powers on earth shall divert us from meeting to adore our God who made us," said Penn as he asked on what law the

indictment was founded. "On the common law," answered the recorder. "Where is that law?" demanded Penn. "The law which is not in being, far from being common, is no law at all." Amid angry exclamations and menaces he proceeded to plead earnestly for the fundamental laws of England, and, as he was hurried out of court, still reminded the jury that "they were his judges." Dissatisfied with the first verdict returned, the recorder heaped upon the jury every opprobrious epithet. "We will have a verdict, by the help of God, or you shall starve for it." "You are Englishmen," said Penn, who had been again brought to the bar; "mind your privilege, give not away your right." "It never will be well with us," said the recorder, "till something like the Spanish inquisition be in England." At last the jury, who had received no refreshments for two days and two nights, on the third day gave their verdict: "Not guilty." The recorder fined them forty marks apiece for their independence, and, amercing Penn for contempt of court, sent him back to prison. The trial was an era in judicial history. The fines were soon afterward discharged by his father, who was now approaching his end. "Son William," said the dying admiral, “if you and your friends keep to your plain way of preaching and living, you will make an end of the priests.'

Inheriting an easy fortune, he continued to defend from the press the principles of intellectual liberty and moral equality; he remonstrated in unmeasured terms against the bigotry and intolerance, " the hellish darkness and debauchery," of the university of Oxford; he exposed the errors of the Roman Catholic church, and in the same breath pleaded for a toleration of their worship; and, never fearing openly to address a Quaker meeting, he was soon on the road to Newgate, to suffer for his honesty by a six months' imprisonment. "You are an ingenious gentleman," said the magistrate at the trial; "you have a plentiful estate; why should you render yourself unhappy by associating with such a simple people?" "I prefer," said Penn, "the honestly simple to the ingeniously wicked." The magistrate rejoined by charging Penn with previous immoralities. The young man, with passionate vehemence, vindicated the spotlessness of his

life. "I speak this," he adds, "to God's glory, who has ever preserved me from the power of these pollutions, and who, from a child, begot a hatred in me toward them. Thy words shall be thy burden; I trample thy slander under my feet."

From Newgate, Penn addressed parliament and the nation in a noble plea for liberty of conscience-a liberty which he defended from experience, from religion, and from reason.

On his release from imprisonment, a calmer season of seven years followed. Penn travelled in Holland and Germany; then returning to England, he married a woman of extraordinary beauty and sweetness of temper, whose noble spirit "chose him before many suitors," and honored him with "a deep and upright love." As persecution in England was suspended, he enjoyed for two years the delights of rural life and the animating pursuit of letters, till the imprisonment of George Fox, on his return from America, demanded intercession. Then it was that, in considering England's present interest, he refused to rest his appeal on the sentiment of mercy, and merited the highest honors of a statesman by unfolding the rights of conscience in their connection with the peace and happiness of the state.

The summer and autumn after the first considerable Quaker emigration, Barclay and Penn went to and fro in Germany, from the Weser to the Mayne, the Rhine, and the Neckar, distributing tracts, discoursing with men of every sect and every rank, rebuking every attempt to inthrall the mind, and sending reproofs to kings and magistrates, to the princes and lawyers of all Christendom. He explained "the universal principle" in the court of the princess palatine, and to the few Quaker converts among the peasantry of Kirchheim. This visit of Penn gave new life to the colonial plans of Oxenstiern, and inflamed the desire of the peasantry and the middle class of Germany to remove to America.

On his return to England he appeared before a committee of the house of commons to plead for universal liberty of conscience.

Defeated in his hopes from parliament by its dissolution, Penn took an active part in the elections of 1679. And, as