nd to the scaffold one of the Seven who had signed the memorable
petition. A warrant was however issued for his apprehension; and his
friends had little hope that he would escape; for his nose was such as
none who had seen it could forget; and it was to little purpose that he
put on a flowing wig and that he suffered his beard to grow. The pursuit
was probably not very hot; for, after skulking a few weeks in England,
he succeeded in crossing the Channel, and remained some time in France.
[21]

A warrant was issued against Penn; and he narrowly escaped the
messengers. It chanced that, on the day on which they were sent in
search of him, he was attending a remarkable ceremony at some distance
from his home. An event had taken place which a historian, whose object
is to record the real life of a nation, ought not to pass unnoticed.
While London was agitated by the news that a plot had been discovered,
George Fox, the founder of the sect of Quakers, died.

More than forty years had elapsed since Fox had begun to see visions and
to cast out devils. [22] He was then a youth of pure morals and grave
deportment, with a perverse temper, with the education of a labouring
man, and with an intellect in the most unhappy of all states, that is
to say, too much disordered for liberty, and not sufficiently disordered
for Bedlam. The circumstances in which he was placed were such as could
scarcely fail to bring out in the strongest form the constitutional
diseases of his mind. At the time when his faculties were ripening,
Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, were striving for
mastery, and were, in every corner of the realm, refuting and reviling
each other. He wandered from congregation to congregation; he heard
priests harangue against Puritans; he heard Puritans harangue against
priests; and he in vain applied for spiritual direction and consolation
to doctors of both parties. One jolly old clergyman of the Anglican
communion told him to smoke tobacco and sing psalms; another advised
him to go and lose some blood. [23] The young inquirer turned in disgust
from these advisers to the Dissenters, and found them also blind guides.
[24] After some time he came to the conclusion that no human being was
competent to instruct him in divine things, and that the truth had been
communicated to him by direct inspiration from heaven. He argued that,
as the division of languages began at Babel, and as the persecutors of
Christ put