I was too young that time to value her; -As You Like It. PREDICTION. THERE is a history in all men's lives -King Henry IV. Part II. A MASQUE. Enter IRIS. Iris. CERES, most bounteous lady, thy rich leas Which spongy April at thy hest betrims, To make cold nymphs chaste crowns; and thy broom groves, Being lass-lorn; thy pole-clipt vineyard; And thy sea-marge, sterile, and rocky-hard, Where thou thyself dost air: the queen o' the sky, Bids thee leave these; and with her sovereign grace, To come and sport: her peacocks fly amain; Enter CERES. Ceres. Hail! many-coloured messenger, that ne'er Who, with thy saffron wings, upon my flowers Rich scarf to my proud earth. Why hath thy queen Iris. A contract of true love to celebrate; And some donation freely to estate On the blessed lovers. Cer. Highest queen of state, Great Juno comes: I know her by her gait. Enter JUNO. Juno. How does my bounteous sister? Go with me, Song. Juno. Honour, riches, marriage-blessing, Scarcity and want shall shun you; Ferdinand. This is a most majestic vision, and To think these spirits? Prospero. I have from their confines called to enact My present fancies. Fer. Spirits, which by mine art Let me live here ever; So rare a wondered father, and a wife, Make this place paradise. [Juno and Ceres whisper, and send Iris on employment.] Pro. Sweet now, silence; Juno and Ceres whisper seriously; There's something else to do: hush, and be mute, Or else our spell is marred. Iris. You nymphs, called Naiads, of the wandering brooks, With your sedged crowns, and ever harmless looks, Leave your crisp channels, and on this green land Enter certain Nymphs. You sun-burned sicklemen, of August weary, attention to study, than for his extreme fondness for all athletic sports. His first bias, too, towards the opinions of that religious sect of which he became afterwards so distinguished an ornament, the Society of Friends, was produced at this period of his life. It was the effect of the preaching of one Thomas Loe, once a member of the university of Oxford, but who had embraced the doctrines of the Quakers, and was now a zealous propagator of the same. Their Serious and thoughtful from his childhood, young Penn was strongly impressed by the views of religious truth which Loe inculcated; and the consequence was, that he and a few of his fellow-students who had been similarly affected began to absent themselves from the established worship of the university, and to hold private meetings among themselves for devotional purposes. For this breach of the college rules a fine was imposed upon them by the authorities of the university. Neither Penn nor his associates were cured of their disposition to nonconformity by this act of severity; they still continued to hold their private meetings, and naturally became more zealous in their views as they saw these views prohibited and discountenanced. zeal soon manifested itself in an act of riot. An order having been sent down to Oxford by Charles II. that the surplice should be worn by the students, as was customary in ancient times, Penn and his companions were so roused by what they conceived a return to popish observances, that, not content with disobeying the order themselves, they attacked those students who appeared in the obnoxious surplices, and tore them off their backs. So flagrant an outrage on college discipline could not be allowed to pass without severe punishment, and accordingly Penn and several of his companions were expelled. As may be conceived, Admiral Penn was by no means pleased when his son returned home with the stigma attached to him of having been expelled from college; nor was he more satisfied when he learned the cause. Himself untroubled with any such religious scruples as those which his son professed, he could not make any allowance for them, but, on the contrary, insisted that he should give them up, and live as any young gentleman of good family and loyal principles might be expected to do. The young man meeting his father's remonstrances with arguments in self-defence, the hasty old admiral turned him out of doors. Through his mother's intercession a reconciliation soon took place; and the admiral determined, as the best means of finishing his son's education, and possibly of curing him of what he considered his over-religiousness, to send him to spend a year or two in France. Penn accordingly left England in 1662, and was absent on the continent till 1664. On his return to England, his father was much pleased to find him so polished in demeanour and manners, and did not doubt but his intention in sending him abroad had been in a great measure fulfilled. By his advice Penn became a student of Lincoln's Inn, where he continued till 1666, when his father sent him over to Ireland to manage his pretty extensive estates in the county of Cork. In this commission he conducted himself entirely to his father's satisfaction, residing sometimes on the estates themselves, sometimes in Dublin, where he had the advantage of mixing in the society attending the court of the Duke of Ormond, lord-lieutenant of Ireland, and his father's friend. While attending to his business in Ireland, however, a circumstance befell him, which might have induced his father to have acted differently, could he have foreseen it. Being accidentally one day in Cork, he heard that Thomas Loe, the person whose preaching had so deeply affected him at Oxford, was to address a meeting of Quakers in that city. Penn could not think of losing the opportunity of again seeing and hearing his old friend, and accordingly he entered the place where Loe was to preach. He took his seat, and had waited for a few minutes, when the preacher rose, and commenced his sermon with the following striking words:-"There is a faith which overcometh the world; and there is a faith which is overcome by the world." The words, and the sermon which they introduced, seemed adapted to his own case. Had not his faith been one which had been overcome by the world? and was it not, therefore, a weak, poor, and useless thing? Such was the force of this reflection, strengthened as it was by intercourse with Loe, that he resolved from that day to devote himself to the service of religion, and to adhere to the sect whose principles he respected most. In short, from that time Penn became a professed Quaker. Nonconformity in religious observances was at that time some-what dangerous. In Scotland, a religious persecution was fiercely raging; and although in other parts of the kingdom the spirit of bigotry on the part of the government did not manifest itself to the same extent, yet everywhere throughout Great Britain and Ireland dissenters were subject to grievous annoyances; and it was in the power of any meddlesome or narrow-minded person to point to numerous persecuting laws existing in the statutebook, and to demand that they should be put in force against them. Accordingly, William Penn soon paid the price of his conscientiousness. Making it a point, ever after his meeting with Loe, to attend the religious assemblies of the Quakers in preference to those of the Established Church, he was apprehended, along with eighteen others, on the 3d of September 1667, and carried before the mayor of Cork, charged with transgressing the act against tumultuous assemblies passed seven years before. The mayor, perceiving Penn to be a gentleman, offered him his liberty on condition that he would give security for his good behaviour in future; but Penn refused to comply with this condition, and was therefore committed to prison with the others. From prison he addressed a letter to the Earl of Orrery, then lord president of Munster, and a friend probably of Admiral Penn, requesting his interference to procure the release of himself and his companions. The earl immediately ordered the release of Penn; the others, it would appear, however, were permitted to remain in prison. Meanwhile some friend of the family, resident in Ireland, had conveyed to the admiral the unwelcome intelligence that his son had joined the Quakers. Without any delay the old man summoned his son home; and their first interview was a stormy one. The admiral at length, finding that his son had become a confirmed Quaker, and losing hope of moving him further, only stipulated that the youth should consent to depart so far from the customs of his sect, as to take off his hat in presence of the king, the Duke of York, and himself! After a violent struggle between filial affection and religious convictions, William announced that he could not agree even to this limited amount of hat worship, and was again turned out of doors. Thus driven out into the world, and disqualified by his previous education for earning his livelihood by any ordinary profession, Penn would have fared badly, had not his mother, without the admiral's knowledge, kept up a communication with him, and supplied him with money out of her own purse. Not long afterwards, being now in the twenty-fourth year of his age, he began to preach at meetings of those who, like himself, had embraced the tenets of the Quakers. About the same time, too, he commenced his career as a polemical pamphleteer-—a character which he kept up till his dying day, having in the course of his life published an immense number of controversial pamphlets in defence of his sect and of religious liberty in general. The title of his first work, published in 1668, was as follows:-" Truth Exalted, in a short but sure Testimony against all those Religions, Faiths, and Worships, that have been formed and followed in the darkness of Apostacy; and for that Glorious Light which is now risen, and shines forth in the Life and Doctrine of the despised Quakers, as the alone good old way of Life and Salvation.' account for the somewhat bombastic appearance of this title, as well as for much in the conduct of William Penn and other early Quakers, which might otherwise seem difficult to explain, it must be mentioned that the early Quakers differed considerably from the modern Society of Friends with respect to the ideas which they entertained regarding the importance of their own sect. George Fox, William Penn, and the early Quakers in general, regarded Quakerism as a "glorious light"-a new dispensation, destined to abrogate existing forms of faith, and restore Christianity to its primitive purity. Hence their sanguine mode of speaking concerning their own mode of faith; hence their extraordinary exertions to make proselytes; and hence that activity, and even restlessness in society, which distinguished the early Quakers from their modern successors. То |