Fox's Journal was published soon after his death, with a lengthy preface by his friend William Penn, containing a warm tribute to his personal worth and Christian labors. The Journal gives us a better and more vivid idea of the man than any biography that has been written. An intelligent and liberal-minded Baptist minister thus describes the impressions it left on his mind:--
"'My dear heart in the truth and the life which are immortal and change not;'
"So George Fox usually addressed his wife. I have finished his life of 650 folio pages since you have been gone. It afforded me much amusement, but its chief impression is that of the highest veneration and delight, for so holy and noble a servant of Christ. I have hitherto regarded Penn as the most beautiful character which that sect has produced, and perhaps it is the most beautiful, because his mind was more polished and cultivated than that of his friend; but Fox's character is by far the most venerable and magnificent. He reminds me of the inspired Tishbite in his stern majesty and fidelity, but he seems to have surpassed him in all the patient, gentle, compassionate, suffering, laborious virtues. If inspiration has been granted since the apostles departed from the world, I think he possessed it. I have read few things more truly sublime than some of his letters to Charles II."--_Memoir of W. Rhodes, Jackson and Walford, p. 179._
Ellwood, the friend of Milton, has left us a glowing testimony to the value of George Fox's Life and Work. But the eulogies of William Penn and Thomas Ellwood are not portraits. One of the best estimates of his character ever given to the world is that by J. C. Colquhoun in "Short Studies of some Notable Lives." In it he says (p. 88-90):--
"The truth is that Fox's character had, like that of many others, two sides; and the contrast between these is so great that one can hardly believe them to belong to the same man. On the one side we have strange thoughts and words, fanciful imaginations, the illusions of an unlettered mind. But such things are not unusual. Dr. Johnson believed in second sight, in dreams and ghosts; and his case presents to us the credulity of a child, with the intellect of a giant.