perseverance in holding their religious meetings in defiance of
penal laws, took upon themselves the burden of persecution which would
otherwise have fallen upon himself and his friends; and makes special
mention of the noble and successful plea of Penn before the Recorder's
Court in London, based on the fundamental liberties of Englishmen and the
rights of the Great Charter.

The intolerance of Baxter towards the Separatists was turned against him
whenever he appealed to the King and Parliament against the proscription
of himself and his friends. "They gathered," he complains, "out of mine
and other men's books all that we had said against liberty for Popery and
Quakers railing against ministers in open congregation, and applied it as
against the toleration of ourselves." It was in vain that he explained
that he was only in favor of a gentle coercion of dissent, a moderate
enforcement of conformity. His plan for dealing with sentries reminds
one of old Isaak Walton's direction to his piscatorial readers, to impale
the frog on the hook as gently as if they loved him.

While at Acton, he was complained of by Dr. Ryves, the rector, one of the
King's chaplains in ordinary, for holding religious services in his
family with more than five strangers present. He was cast into
Clerkenwell jail, whither his faithful wife followed him. On his
discharge, he sought refuge in the hamlet of Totteridge, where he wrote
and published that Paraphrase on the New Testament which was made the
ground of his prosecution and trial before Jeffreys.

On the 14th of the sixth month, 1681, he was called to endure the
greatest affliction of his life. His wife died on that day, after a
brief illness. She who had been his faithful friend, companion, and
nurse for twenty years was called away from him in the time of his
greatest need of her ministrations. He found consolation in dwelling on
her virtues and excellences in the Breviate of her life; "a paper
monument," he says, "erected by one who is following her even at the door
in some passion indeed of love and grief." In the preface to his
poetical pieces he alludes to her in terms of touching simplicity and
tenderness: "As these pieces were mostly written in various passions, so
passion hath now thrust them out into the world. God having taken away
the dear companion of the last nineteen years of my life, as her sorrows
and sufferings long ago gave being to some of these poems, for reaso