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Excerpt from William Penn: An Historical Biography, From New Sources; With an Extra Chapter on the "Macaulay Charges" William Penn has been called a mythical rather than an historical personage. The accounts given of him by his professed biographers - Besse, Clarkson, Weems, and Lewis - are sufficiently vague, lifeless, and transcendental to merit such a censure. By far the best and most complete of these works is that by Clarkson; but it has serious defects. Beyond a reverential sympathy with Penn's religious ideas, the modern philanthropist had no advantages for the task he undertook. He was profoundly unacquainted with the history of the period; he copied the ignorance of Besse and others without misgiving and without acknowledgment. Of the families of Penn and Springett he know absolutely nothing; of their fortunes and misfortunes, though daily affecting his hero's life and character, no trace appears in his pages. He had read only a few books, and those were of the commonest kind. Of the vast collections of MS. papers in the British Museum, in the Bodleian Library, in the State Paper Office, in the Privy Council and other government offices, and in the library of the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, - throwing ample and authentic light on his career, - he had no knowledge, and of course made no use. I believe I may safely assert that two-thirds of the facts now known about Penn were not known to Clarkson. His want of information, however, was not altogether his fault. Since he wrote his memoir, now forty years ago, the sources of our history, and more particularly of the seventeenth century, have been much more critically investigated. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.