The melancholy Cowley, the ingenious bishop of Cloyne, and many others, alike eminent for virtue and for genius, looked forward to this region of liberty as a soil, where peace, science, and religion could have room to take root and flourish unmolested. In those primeval solitudes, enriched by the choicest bounties of nature, they might (as these benevolent speculators thought) extend their shelter to tribes no longer savage, rejoicing in the light of evangelic truth, and exalting science. Little did these amiable projectors know how much is to be done before the human mind, debased by habitual vice, and cramped by artificial manners in the old world, can wash out its stains and resume its simplicity in a new; nor did they know through how many gradual stages of culture the untutored intellect of savage tribes must pass before they become capable of comprehending those truths which to us habit has rendered obvious, or which at any rate we have talked of so familiarly, that we think we comprehend them. These projectors of felicity were not so ignorant of human nature, as to expect change of place could produce an instantaneous change of character; but they hoped to realize an Utopia, where justice should be administered on the purest principles; from which venality should be banished, and where mankind should, through the paths of truth and uprightness, arrive at the highest attainable happiness in a state not meant for perfection. They “talked the style of gods,” making very little account of “chance and sufferance.” Their speculations of the result remind me of what is recorded in some ancient writer, of a project for building a magnificent temple to Diana in some one of the Grecian states. A reward was offered to him who should erect, at the public cost, with most taste and ingenuity, a structure which should do honour both to the goddess and her worshippers. Several candidates appeared. The first that spoke was a self-satisfied young man, who, in a long florid harangue, described the pillars, the porticoes, and the proportions of this intended building, seeming all the while more intent on the display of his elocution, than on the subject of his discourse. When he had finished, a plain elderly man came from behind him, and leaning forwards, said in a deep hollow voice, “All that he has said, I will do.” 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.