Descended from a father at once gifted by nature and ennobled by services to the state, which it could not requite; himself favored with large wealth; bred at Oxford University; a law student of Lincoln’s Inn; a sagacious and observing traveller over all Europe; skilled in all manly accomplishments, including swimming and the use of the broadsword; the friend of Sir Isaac Newton, of Algernon Sidney, and Lord William Russell,—he exhibited that rare union, a moral courage that dared to live out his convictions, although counter to those with whom he associated and although leading him to prison and severe persecution, and a gentleness of speech and manner that persuaded all whom he met, not only of his own personal honesty, but of the truth of his principles. In 1681 he obtained from Charles II. a grant of all the lands embraced in the present limits of Pennsylvania; and in the following autumn he came out to prospect his large unfenced farm. Sailing up the Delaware, over fins whose ancestors had preceded him by centuries, and between banks colonized sparsely by Finns and Swedes thirty-nine years before, he landed at New Castle. His open, sunny face, then browned with thirty-eight summers, warmed even the Indians toward him, in the frosty month of November; and thus trickled their confidence and trust: “You are our brothers. We will leave a broad path for you and us to walk in. If an Englishman falls asleep in the path, the Indian shall pass him by and say: ‘He is an Englishman; he is asleep; let him alone.’ The path shall be plain; there shall not be in it a stump to hurt the feet.” [Illustration: 1681.] [Illustration: 1869.] THE CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE. At the junction of the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers,—a triangle since often worked at by people who, wanting his simplicity, have tried so to draw their lines as to prove that an acute angle is larger than the other two, even if those two be very obtuse,—at this place he halted to work out the problem of a city to be governed by brotherly love. He found clumps of pine, chestnut, and walnut trees,—names which grew to the streets which displaced them. Disliking crowded towns, which he had found to be but nurseries of vice, he desired his city to be planted with gardens round each house, so as to form “a greene countrie towne.” The jealous rivals of the Quaker Emporium assert that he succeeded in carrying out his plan.