It is a curious fact that the spirit of protest will often pass by serious offenses and fasten upon some apparently slight occasion which has rather a symbolical than an actual importance. William Penn, so far as we know, endured the disorders of anti-Puritan Oxford without protest. He entered so far into the life of the place as to contribute, with other students, to a series of Latin elegies upon the death of the Duke of Gloucester; and he "delighted," Anthony Wood tells us, "in manly sports at times of recreation." It is true that he may have written to his father to take him away, for Mr. Pepys records in his journal, under date of Jan. 25, 1662, "Sir W. Pen came to me, and did break a business to me about removing his son from Oxford to Cambridge, to some private college." But nothing came of it. William is said, indeed, to have absented himself rather often from the college prayers, and to have joined with other students whom the Quaker preaching had affected in holding prayer-meetings in their own rooms. But all went fairly well until an order was issued requiring the students, according to the ancient custom, to wear surplices in chapel. Then the young Puritan arose, and assisted in a ritual rebellion. He and his friends "fell upon those students who appeared in surplices, and he and they together tore them everywhere over their heads." Not content with thus seizing and rending the obnoxious vestments, they proceeded further to thrust the white gowns into the nearest cesspool, into whose depths they poked them with long sticks. This incident ended William's course at college. It is doubtful whether he was expelled or only suspended. He was dismissed, and never returned. Eight years after, chancing to pass through Oxford, and learning that Quaker students were still subjected to the rigors of academic discipline, he wrote a letter to the vice-chancellor. It probably expresses the sentiments with which as an undergraduate he had regarded the university authorities: "Shall the multiplied oppressions which thou continuest to heap upon innocent English people for their religion pass unregarded by the Eternal God? Dost thou think to escape his fierce wrath and dreadful vengeance for thy ungodly and illegal persecution of his poor children? I tell thee, no. Better were it for thee thou hadst never been born." And so on, in the controversial dialect of the time, calling the vice-chancellor a "poor mushroom," and abusing him generally. Elsewhere, in a retrospect which I shall presently quote at length, he refers to his university experiences: "Of my persecution at Oxford, and how the Lord sustained me in the midst of that hellish darkness and debauchery; of my being banished the college." III IN FRANCE AND IRELAND: THE WORLD AND THE OTHER WORLD