were to be visited, the insane and the outcast; and the wrongs and cruelties of law, whether in death-sentences for mere offences against property, or in brutal methods of prison-treatment, were to be exposed and condemned.  For the rest, the Friends were to walk industriously and domestically through the world, honest in their dealings, wearing a plain Puritan garb, and avoiding all vanities and gaieties.—­Had it been possible for such a sect to come into existence by mere natural growth, or the unconcerted association of like-minded persons in all parts of the country at once, even then, one can see, there would have been irritation between it and the rest of the community.  The refusal to pay tithes, the refusal of oaths in Courts of Law or anywhere else, the objection to war and to the trade of a soldier, the Theeing and Thouing of all indiscriminately, the keeping of the hat on in any presence, would have occasioned constant feud between any little nucleus of Quakers and the society round about it.  But the sect had not formed itself by any such quiet process of simultaneous grouping among people who had somehow imbibed its tenets.  It had come into being, and in fact had shaped its tenets and become aware of them, through a previous fervour of itinerant Propagandism such as had hardly been known since the first Apostles and Christian missionaries had walked among the heathen.  The first Quaker, the man in whose dreamings by himself, aided by scanty readings, the principles of the sect had been evolved, and in whose conduct by himself for a year or two the sect had practically originated, was the good, blunt, obstinate, opaque-brained, ecstatic, Leicestershire shoemaker, George Fox, the 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