and in consequence of this same book, he was actually confined as a prisoner within the gloomy walls of the old Norman fortress, where he remained seven months; and where he wrote his _No Cross, No Crown, or Several Sober Reasons against Hat Worship, Titular Respect, You to a single person, with the Apparel and Recreations of the Times, in Defence of the poor despised Quakers, against the practice and objections of their adversaries_. The title is modified in later editions. [Sidenote: QUAKERS.--WILLIAM PENN.] The old Admiral paid his son’s fines, and on his deathbed, in altered tones, observed to him, “Son William, if you and your friends keep to your plain way of preaching and living, you will make an end of the priests.” Now possessed of his father’s fortune, he surprised people by his religious eccentricities. “You are an ingenious gentleman,” said a magistrate before whom he was brought, “you have a plentiful estate, why should you render yourself unhappy by associating with such a simple people?” “I prefer,” said he, “the honestly simple to the ingeniously wicked;” this was in 1670, when committed to Newgate, under the Conventicle Act, for preaching to “a riotous and seditious assembly,”--that is to say, for preaching to a company of Friends, who met for worship in the open-air; and from Newgate, he addressed to Parliament and the people of England, a plea for liberty of conscience, saying, if the efforts of the Quakers cannot obtain “the olive branch of toleration, we bless the providence of God, resolving by patience to outweary persecution, and by our constant sufferings, to obtain a victory, more glorious than our adversaries can achieve by their cruelties.”[499] These incidents in his early life were obviously connected with his religious opinions. Far less imbued with the element of mysticism than was the founder of the sect, this eminent disciple appears no less earnest in the advocacy of his opinions; and he works them out with a facility of reasoning, a compass of knowledge, and a force and glow of diction, in which the reader cannot but recognize, in connection with his natural ability, the fruits of his Oxford culture. A comparison between the writings of Fox and Penn, as it regards mental peculiarities, is interesting and instructive, showing the original and creative genius of the one, and the effect of academical training upon the other: in the enjoyment of a spiritual education, not of this world, they were much alike.