Boehme of England. From the year 1646, when he was two and twenty years of age, the life of Fox had been an incessant tramp through the towns and villages of the Midlands and the North, with preachings in barns, in inns, in market-places, outside courts of justice, and often inside the steeple-houses themselves, by way of interruption of the regular ministers, or correction of their doctrine after the hours of regular service. Extraordinary excitements had attended him everywhere, paroxysms of delight in him with tears and tremblings, outbreaks of rage against him with hootings and stonings. Again and again he had been brought before justices and magistrates, to whose presence indeed he naturally tended of his own accord for the purpose of lecturing them on their duties, and to whom he was always writing Biblical letters. He had been beaten and put in the stocks; he had been in Derby jail and in several other prisons, charged with riot or blasphemy; and in these prisons he had found work to his mind and had sometimes converted his jailors. And so, by the year 1654, "the man with the leather breeches," as he was called, had become a celebrity throughout England, with scattered converts and adherents everywhere, but voted a pest and terror by the public authorities, the regular steeple-house clergy whether Presbyterian or Independent, and the appointed preachers of all the old sects. By this time, however, he was by no means the sole preacher of Quakerism. Every now and then from among his converts there had started up one fitted to assist him in the work of itinerant propagandism, and the number of such had increased in 1654 to about sixty in all. Richard Farnsworth, James Nayler, William Dewsbury, Thomas Aldam, John Audland, Francis Howgill, Edward Burrough, Thomas Taylor, John Camm, Richard Hubberthorn, Miles Halhead, James Parnel, Thomas Briggs, Robert Widders, George Whitehead, Thomas Holmes, James Lancaster, Alexander Parker, William Caton, and John Stubbs, of the one sex, with Elizabeth Hooton, Anna Downer, Elizabeth Heavens, Elizabeth Fletcher, Barbara Blaugden, Catherine Evans, and Sarah Cheevers, of the other sex, were among the chief of these early Quaker preachers after Fox. They had carried the doctrines into every part of England, and also into Scotland and Ireland; some of them had even been moved to go to the Continent. Wherever they went there was the same disturbance round them as round Fox himself, and they had the same hard treatment--imprisonment, duckings, whippings. It is necessary that the reader should remember that in 1654 Quakerism was still in this first stage of its diffusion by a vehement propagandism carried on by some sixty itinerant preachers at war with established habits and customs, and had not settled down into mere individual Quietism, with associations of those who had been converted to its principles, and could be content with their own local meetings. In the chief centres,