“Bancroft’s writings are as well worthy of study, both for form and substance, as any that have been produced on American soil.”—_John McClintock, LL.D._ “His every paragraph is animated with a philanthropic, liberal and progressive spirit.”—_D. D. Whedon, D.D._ “The work of Mr. Bancroft may be considered as a copious philosophical treatise, tracing the growth of the idea of liberty in a country designed by Providence for its development. It is written in a style marked by singular elaborateness, compactness, and scholarly grace, and is esteemed one of the noblest monuments of American literature.”—_American Cyclopædia._ William Penn. Penn, despairing of relief in Europe, bent the whole energy of his mind to accomplish the establishment of a free government in the New World. For that “heavenly end” he was prepared by the severe discipline of life, and the love, without dissimulation, which formed the basis of his character. The sentiment of cheerful humanity was irrepressibly strong in his bosom. As with John Eliot and Roger Williams, benevolence gushed prodigally from his ever-flowing heart, and when, in his late old age, his intellect was impaired, and his reason prostrated by apoplexy, his sweetness of disposition rose serenely over the clouds of disease. Possessing an extraordinary greatness of mind, vast conceptions, remarkable for their universality and precision, and surpassing in speculative endowments, conversant with men, with books, and governments, with various languages, and the forms of political combinations as they existed in England and France, in Holland, and the principalities and free cities of Germany, he yet sought the source of wisdom in his own soul. Humane by nature and suffering, familiar with the royal family, intimate with Sunderland and Sydney, acquainted with Russel, Halifax, Shaftesbury and Buckingham, as a member of the Royal Society, the peer of Newton, and the great scholars of his age—he valued the promptings of a free mind more than the awards of the learned, and reverenced the simple minded sincerity of the Nottingham shepherd more than the authority of colleges and the wisdom of philosophers. And now, being in the meridian of life, but a year older than was Locke, when, twelve years before, he had framed a constitution for Carolina, the Quaker legislator was come to the New World to lay the foundation of states. Would he imitate the vaunted system of the great philosopher?