with "cyphering and
casting-up accounts," being a good scholar, we may guess, in the
classics, but encountering the master's "severe government" in his sums.
Chigwell was as Puritan a place as Wanstead. About the time of William's
going thither, the vicar had been ejected on petition from the
parishioners, who complained that he had an altar before which he bowed
and cringed, and which he had been known to kiss "twice in one day."

It is plain that religion made up a large, interesting, and important
part of life in these villages in which William Penn was getting his
first impressions of the world. All about were great forests, whose
shadows invited him to seclusion and meditation. All the news was of
great battles, most of them fought in a religious cause, which even a
lad could appreciate, and towards which he would readily take an
attitude of stout partisanship. The boy was deeply affected by these
surroundings. "I was bred a Protestant," he said long afterwards, "and
that strictly, too." Trained as he was in Puritan habits of
introspection, he listened for the voice of God, and heard it. Thus the
tone of his life was set. There were moments in his youth when "the
world," as the phrase is, attracted him; there were times in his great
career when he seemed, and perhaps was, disobedient to this heavenly
vision; but, looking back from the end of his life to this beginning,
"as a tale that is told," it is seen to be lived throughout in the light
of the glory which shone in his room at Wanstead. William Penn from that
hour was a markedly religious man. Thereafter, nothing was so manifest
or eminent about him as his religion.

II

AT OXFORD: INFLUENCE OF THOMAS LOE

On the 22d of April, 1661, we get another glimpse of William.

Mr Pepys, having risen early on the morning of that day, and put on his
velvet coat, and made himself, as he says, as fine as he could, repaired
to Mr. Young's, the flag-maker, in Cornhill, to view the procession
wherein the king should ride through London. There he found "Sir W. Pen
and his son, with several others." "We had a good room to ourselves," he
says, "with wine and good cake, and saw the show very well." The streets
were new graveled, and the fronts of the houses hung with carpets, with
ladies looking out of all the windows; and "so glorious was the show
with gold and silver, that we were not able to look at it, our eyes at
last being so overcome."

This was a glory very d