His remains were committed to their final resting-place in the burial ground of the Temple Church, and the staircase of his chambers is said to have been filled with mourners the reverse of domestic—­women without a home, without domesticity of any kind, with no friend but him they had come to weep for, outcasts of that great, solitary, wicked city, to whom he had never forgotten to be kind and charitable.

Johnson spoke his epitaph in an emphatic sentence:  “He had raised money, and squandered it, by every artifice of acquisition and folly of expense; but let not his frailties be remembered—­he was a very great man.”

* * * * *

GEORGE FOX

Journal

George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends, or “Friends of the Truth,” was born at Drayton, Leicestershire, in July, 1624, and died in London on January 13, 1691.  His “Journal,” here epitomised, was published in 1694, after being revised by a committee under the superintendence of William Penn, and prefaced for the press by Thomas Ellwood, the Quaker.  Fox rejected all outward shows of religion, and believed in an inward light and leading.  He claimed to be divinely directed as he wandered, Bible in hand, through the country, denouncing church-worship, a paid ministry, religious “profession,” and advocating a spiritual affiliation with Christ as the only true religion.  He was imprisoned often and long for “brawling” in churches and refusing to take oaths then required by law.  Fox wrote in prison many books of religious exhortation, his style being tantalisingly involved.  The one work that lives is the “Journal,” a quaintly egotistic record of unquestioning faith and unconquerable endurance in pursuit of a spiritual ideal through a rude age.

I.—­His Youth and Divine Calling

I was born in the month called July, 1624, at Drayton-in-the-Clay, in Leicestershire.  My father’s name was Christopher Fox; he was by profession a weaver, an honest man, and there was a seed of God in him.  In my very young years I had a gravity and staidness of mind and spirit not usual in children.  When I came to eleven years of age I knew pureness and righteousness.  The Lord taught me to be faithful in all things, inwardly to God and outwardly to man, and to keep to “Yea” and “Nay” in all things.

Afterwards, as I grew up, I was put to a man, a shoemaker by trade, who dealt in wool, and was a grazier, and sold cattle, and a great deal went through my hands.  I never wronged man or woman in all that time; for the Lord’s power was with me, and over me to preserve me.  While I was in that service, it was common saying among people that knew me, “If George says ‘Verily,’ there is no altering him.”