younger than himself, Penn retained an affection which had commenced in early life; but to his great brother Algernon he was at once a friend and pupil. Henry was nearly twenty years younger than his illustrious brother. He had seen but little of the best period of the Revolution, and had never known the purer and more moderate of its chiefs. Gifted by nature with a handsome face and a voluptuous imagination, he had easily taken up the courtly habits which he found in fashion when he entered life. Between the brothers there was little sympathy, and not much love. In his infancy Algernon had been remarkable for his fine wit and natural sweetness. In the civil war he had made a name for wisdom in the council and for valour in the field. A sincere republican, he had opposed the designs of Cromwell with as much zeal as he had shown in fighting against the King. Abroad at the Restoration, he had lived in exile rather than unsay a single word of his political faith. For seventeen years had he lived abroad; his friends had made great efforts to obtain for him a pardon; but as he would concede nothing, the negotiations had always failed. The utmost that could be drawn from him -though wasting away with sickness-was a declaration to the effect that he was willing to submit to the King, since Parliament had done so. He could on no account regret what he had done, renounce his old opinions, or even ask a pardon. To those who bade him distrust the instincts which made him a wanderer and a beggar in a foreign land, he said, 'I walk in the light which God hath

given me. If it be dim or uncertain, I must bear the penalty of my errors. I hope to do it with patience, and that no burden should be very grievous to me except sin and shame. God keep me from these evils, and in all things else dispose of me according to His pleasure.'

After an absence of seventeen years Sydney was allowed to return to his father's death-bed. Penn saw him; they discussed his schemes. A man of Sydney's strength could not remain inactive. Old Commonwealth men looked up to him. A vanquished body, they had great traditions; and were very powerful in the towns. If Sydney never hid his preference of a republic to a monarchy he was willing to help in bringing about reforms in the government, and one great object of the men with whom he acted was to procure an act of Parliament giving Freedom to Conscience. Buckingham's vanity was flattered with the thought of being at the head of this body of reformers, but the French agent, M. Barillon, saw and said that he was swayed by Sydney.

An impression was produced on the two houses, and in the early part of 1678 there had arisen a more friendly feeling towards Non-conformers. The House of Commons no longer refused to hear of grievances; and Penn presented a petition to that body on behalf of suffering Quakers who had been confounded with the followers of Rome in order to involve them in a common fault and fine. A committee was named to see if it were possible to relieve the great body of Protestants from

penalties which had been legally imposed on Catholics. Penn was heard by this committee. 'If,' he said, 'we ought to believe that it is our duty, according to the doctrine of the Apostle, to be always ready to give an account of the hope that is in us to every sober and private inquirer. certainly much more ought we to hold ourselves obliged to declare with all readiness, when called to it by so great an authority, what is not our hope; especially when our very safety is eminently concerned in so doing, and when we cannot decline this discrimination of ourselves from Papists without being conscious to ourselves of the guilt of our own sufferings, for so must every man needs be who suffers mutely under another character than that which truly belongeth to him and his belief. That which gives me more than an ordinary right to speak at this time, and in this place, is the great abuse which I have received above any other of my profession; for of a long time I have not only been supposed a Papist, but a Seminary, a Jesuit, an emissary of Rome, and in pay from the Pope; a man dedicating my endeavours to the interest and advancements of that party. Nor hath this been the report of the rabble, but the jealousy and insinuation of persons otherwise sober and discreet. Nay, some zealous for the Protestant religion have been so far gone in this mistake, as not only to think ill of us, and to decline our conversation, but to take courage to themselves to prosecute us for a sort of concealed Papists; and the truth is, we have been as the wool-sacks and common whipping-stock of the king

dom all laws have been let loose upon us, as if the design were not to reform, but destroy us; and this not for what we are, but for what we are not. It is hard that we must thus bear the stripes of another interest and be their proxy in punishment. I would not be mistaken. I am far from thinking it fit that Papists should be whipped for their consciences, because I exclaim against the injustice of whipping Quakers for Papists. No; for though the hand, pretended to be lifted up against them, hath lighted heavily on us, yet we do not mean that any should take a fresh aim at them, or that they should come in our room; for we must give the liberty we ask ; and cannot be false to our principles, though it were to relieve ourselves. We have good-will to all men, and would have none suffer for a truly sober and conscientious dissent on any hand. And I humbly take leave to add, that those methods against persons so qualified do not seem to me to be convincing, or indeed adequate to the reason of mankind.'

To doubt the policy of whipping Papists, was in that age fatal. Penn, however, spoke the truth; and spoke it years before John Locke had given it form and breadth. The Church was still a persecuting Church; the Catholics were intolerant in their practice; Puritans, Independents, Presbyterians, each appealed in turn to stocks and whipping-posts.

The committee resolved to insert in a bill then before Parliament a clause providing relief; and in this amended form the bill, having passed a third reading in the lower House, went up under promising auspices to the Peers. The friends of

Toleration were already congratulating each other on a first victory, when, from an obscure and unexpected quarter, burst, a storm.

Titus Oates was a minister of the Church of England till his dissolute life had caused him to be expelled. He joined the Roman Catholics; he entered the Jesuits' College at Valladolid; he afterwards removed to that of St. Omer; from both of which he was removed in shame. In these colleges he had heard conversations on the prospects of Catholicism in England, and suggestions for carrying on the good work of its recovery to the ancient faith. A quick imagination framed from these materials the Popish Plot. Oates said he had been trusted by the Jesuits in Spain and France with the conveyance of certain letters and papers; that he had opened these documents out of curiosity; that he had become possessed of dark and terrible secrets. England, he asserted, was to be the scene of a bloody drama. Charles was to be killed. William of Orange was to be also killed. Even James, the Catholic Duke of York, would not be spared. The price of these great crimes had been already paid. Every true Protestant would be murdered. A French army was to land in Ireland. When the reformed faith was put down, the whole country would be given up to the Jesuits. What the real facts—if any—underlying all these fables were, has never been discovered. Men of sober sense believed there were some facts. Sydney, than whom no man in that age had a more thorough knowledge of the Catholic courts, believed in a plot,