WILLIAM PENN.•
" AT night comes Mrs. Turner to see us ; and there, among other talk, she tells me that Mr. William Pen, who is lately coats over from Ireland, is a Quaker again, or some very melancholy thing; that he cares for no company nor comes into any : which is a pleasant thing after his being abroad so long and his father such a hypocritied rogue and at this time an Atheist." Thus the austere Mr. Samuel Pepys on December 28th, 1007, which ho had headed Lord's Day" in his Diary and piously- devoted to Bottling up his Tangier accounts the said accounts coming out, to his groat content, "very even and naturally." After that, the " melancholy thing" disappears from the Diary. Pepys mentions him but twice later, and then only in relation to his books ; of which he thought Truth Exalted "so full of nothing but nonsense" that he was ashamed to read it ; and of The Sandy Foundation Shaken he charitably opined that it was "too good for him ever to have writ it." To a mind truly respectable, like that of the future Secretary to the Admiralty, there must indeed havb been always something a little uncomfortable about the character of William Penn. His accounts never "came very even and naturally." You had to adroit he had got on pretty well in the world and was seen a good deal at Court, but you never knew where you were with him ; he was always likely to "intrude Religion into private life." Papp, had an appreciative eye for many diverse human qualities, but moral elevation was outside its scope ; a greater than his adored. Sir William Coventry was ripening into full power beside him, and he never knew it.
In judging Pepys, however, we must remember that at the time he wrote Penn was still known only WS a militant passive resister and a controversial theologian, perhaps the least amiable of his aepeets. We cannot help admiring the invincible courage with which he confronted abuse and persecution, but there was a lack of "sweet reasonableness" in his polemical writings which makes us doubt whether he altogether merited the title of saint which his present biographer bestows upon him. When we turn to his great contemporary, Bishop Ken, the St. Francis of the Nonjurors, we breathe a purer spiritual atmosphere at once. In Ken even, golieal love and benevolence were innate ; we almost feel it was hardly a virtue in him to be charitable to those that hated him, Bo easy and obvious was it to his nature. Penn was a more redoubt. able opponent ; he laid about bins on paper with a vigour almost comical. One of his pamphlets—" The Counterfeit Christian Detected Against the Vile Forgeries, Gross Perversione, Black Slanders, Plain Contradictions and Scurrilous Language of T. Risks an Annabaptist Preacher by a Lover of Truth and Peace W. P."— reminds us profanely of Mark Twain's Buck Fanshawo, who "was always for peace and would have pesos" and who put down the election riot" before it got a start. He waltzed in with a spanner in one hand and a trumpet in the other and sent fourteen men home on a shutter in less than three minutes." However good • WIldesi Pas. By JObli W. Ondare, M.A. London; Headley Brothers. Ns. net; his intentions may have been, "-W. P." appears to more advantage elsewhere than- in thee.) wordy brawls. He outs • far Seer figure in his own home, where Mr. Graham shows him to wi as a devoted husband and a wise and loving father ; at the Court of James IL, where we sae him intervening always on behalf of the innocent and oppressed, and consoling where he could not protect; in America, the founder, lawgiver, anti administrator of a country nearly the size of England.
It was in this last character that his genius found freest ON. pression. To Friends he will always ho their groat protagonist and apologist ; but in the minds of people in general he will be aeon. rated primarily with the Ststo with which his name is already identified. It was through no effort or intrigue of his that ho was led into taking the responsibility of organizing and directing the Colony, for he accepted. the grant of the land as the only pay- ment ho wen ever likely to get of an old debt duo by the Crown to his father. But once he was appointed his faculty of states. manahip made itself manifest. Locke freely admitted that his own Constitution for the Carolinas was inferior to Penn's Frame of Government for. Pennsylvania. In matters of education, penology, religious toleration, and negro slavery the Quaker legislator was wonderfully in advance of his age—no far, indeed, in advance that his successors receded from hie position, amt it took more than a century to restore the standard of progress to the place where Penn left it. But his boldness was justified in 1778, when the Frame of Government was used as the bads of the Federal Constitution of the United States. In active administration he was equally eminent and daring ; his uprightness, candour, anti unselfishness made him respected alike by his own colonists and the Indians who surrounded them. He proved by his success that oven in the affairs of this world an honest policy is not only the most honourable but incomparably the wised.; and hero also the lesson of his career was lost upon his descendants. Mr. Graham tells what Popys would call "a pleasant timing" to Ulm:trete this. An agreement existed between the Mlinaink Indiana and Penn.
" which gave him land extending north from the limit of previous ownership as much as a man could walk in a day and a half. This was a well-understood standard. An ordinary group of whites and Indians walked through the brush, stopped for lunch, clambered over creeks, and did their twenty miles through the forest in a day. This would have taken them to the intended place whore the rivers met. But Thomas Penn (the son of the founder] wanted to sell land north•ofthis ; on which settlers indeed already squatted. He had abandoned Quakerism and all Ili* father's idealism. Ho decided to cheat. Two athletes were trained, a path was cut beforehand, boats were ready at the fords, horses carried food and camp utensils. They covered sixty miles ; and then they drew a line slanting still further north. Ito much for cleverness."
We need not dwell here on the sad decline in Penn's mind tillt1 fortunes during his later years ; the long day's task wee done and he slept. He has been happy in his Tretent, biographer. Mr. Graham's style is fluent and unpretentious. He arranges hie nariativo clearly and tells it vividly. He lets his hero speak for himself where possible, and where he has to sununarize or assign motives, we have no doubt ha correctly interprets Penn's attitude He is, we think, wrong in attributing malice against the Quakers to Macaulay. The historian's diary proves that, however untenable may have been the position lie took up with regard to the famous " Penne " letter, he honestly thought himself right. In other respects Mr. Graham is intpartial, and he has condensed such a mass of information about his subject into a not too bulky book that it will probably remain, for a long time, the standard one- volume Life of William Penn.
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