gs by himself,
aided by scanty readings, the principles of the sect had been
evolved, and in whose conduct by himself for a year or two the sect
had practically originated, was the good, blunt, obstinate,
opaque-brained, ecstatic, Leicestershire shoemaker, George Fox, the
Boehme of England. From the year 1646, when he was two and twenty
years of age, the life of Fox had been an incessant tramp through the
towns and villages of the Midlands and the North, with preachings in
barns, in inns, in market-places, outside courts of justice, and
often inside the steeple-houses themselves, by way of interruption of
the regular ministers, or correction of their doctrine after the
hours of regular service. Extraordinary excitements had attended him
everywhere, paroxysms of delight in him with tears and tremblings,
outbreaks of rage against him with hootings and stonings. Again and
again he had been brought before justices and magistrates, to whose
presence indeed he naturally tended of his own accord for the purpose
of lecturing them on their duties, and to whom he was always writing
Biblical letters. He had been beaten and put in the stocks; he had
been in Derby jail and in several other prisons, charged with riot or
blasphemy; and in these prisons he had found work to his mind and had
sometimes converted his jailors. And so, by the year 1654, "the man
with the leather breeches," as he was called, had become a celebrity
throughout England, with scattered converts and adherents everywhere,
but voted a pest and terror by the public authorities, the regular
steeple-house clergy whether Presbyterian or Independent, and the
appointed preachers of all the old sects. By this time, however, he
was by no means the sole preacher of Quakerism. Every now and then
from among his converts there had started up one fitted to assist him
in the work of itinerant propagandism, and the number of such had
increased in 1654 to about sixty in all. Richard Farnsworth, James
Nayler, William Dewsbury, Thomas Aldam, John Audland, Francis
Howgill, Edward Burrough, Thomas Taylor, John Camm, Richard
Hubberthorn, Miles Halhead, James Parnel, Thomas Briggs, Robert
Widders, George Whitehead, Thomas Holmes, James Lancaster, Alexander
Parker, William Caton, and John Stubbs, of the one sex, with
Elizabeth Hooton, Anna Downer, Elizabeth Heavens, Elizabeth Fletcher,
Barbara Blaugden, Catherine Evans, and Sarah Cheevers, of the other
sex, were among the chief of these