William Penn was the man, born to give “a local habitation and a name,” to all that had hitherto only floated in the day-dreams of poets and philosophers.
To qualify him for the legislator of a new-born sect, with all the innocence and all the helplessness of infancy, many circumstances concurred, that could scarce ever be supposed to happen at once to the same person. Born to fortune and distinction, with a mind powerful and cultivated, he knew, experimentally, all the advantages to be derived from wealth or knowledge, and could not be said ignorantly to despise them. He had, in his early days, walked far enough into the paths of folly and dissipation, to know human character in all its varieties, and to say experimentally, all is vanity. With a vigorous mind, an ardent imagination, and a heart glowing with the warmest benevolence, he appears to have been driven, by a repulsive abhorrence of the abuse of knowledge, of pleasure, and pre-eminence, which he had witnessed, into the opposite extreme; into a sect, the very first principles of which, clip the wings of fancy, extinguish ambition, and bring every struggle for superiority, the result of uncommon powers of mind, down to the dead level of tame equality; a sect that reminds one of the exclusion of poets from Plato’s fancied republic, by stripping off all the many-coloured garbs with which learning and imagination have invested the forms of ideal excellence, and reducing them to a few simple realities, arrayed as soberly as their votaries.
This sect, which brings mankind to a resemblance of Thomson’s Laplanders,
“Who little pleasure know, and feel no pain,”
might be supposed the last to captivate, nay, to absorb, such a mind as I have been describing. Yet so it was: even in the midst of all this cold humility, dominion was to be found. That rule, which of all others, is most gratifying to a mind conscious of its own power, and directing it to the purposes of benevolence, the voluntary subjection of mind, the homage which a sect pays to its leader, is justly accounted the most gratifying species of power; and to this lurking ambition, every thing is rendered subservient by those who have once known this native and inherent superiority. This man, who had wasted his inheritance, alienated his relations, and estranged his friends; who had forsaken the religion of his ancestors, and in a great measure, the customs of his country; whom some charged with folly, and others with madness, was, nevertheless, destined to plan with consummate wisdom, and execute with indefatigable activity and immovable firmness, a scheme of government, such as has been the wish, at least, of every enlarged and benevolent mind, (from Plato downwards,) which has indulged speculations of the kind. The glory of realizing, in some degree, all these fair visions, was, however, reserved for William Penn alone.