"Laying here and there
"A fiery finger on the leaves,"
when Penn, also, established a perfect friendship with the savages at Shackamaxon.[16]
Calvert, a protestant officer of the crown, became a catholic, and, retiring to private life, was rewarded by his king, with a pension, estates, and an American principality;—Penn, the son of a British Admiral, and who is only accurately known to us by a portrait which represents him in armor, began life as an adherent of the Church of England, and having conscientiously, doffed the steel for the simple garb of Quakerism, was persecuted, not only by his government but his parent. Calvert took the grant of a feudal charter, and asserting all its legislative and baronial powers, sought to fasten its Chinese influence, in feudal fixedness, on his colonists;—but Penn, knowing that feudalism was an absurdity, in the necessary equality of a wilderness, embraced his great authority in order "to leave himself and his successors no power of doing mischief, so that the will of one man might not hinder the good of a whole community."[17]
Calvert seems to have thought of English or Irish emigration alone;—Penn, did not confine himself to race, but sought for support from the Continent as well as from Britain.[18]
Calvert was ennobled for his services;—Penn rejected a birthright which might have raised him to the peerage.
Calvert's public life was antecedent to his American visit—Penn's was almost entirely subsequent to the inception of his "holy experiment."
Calvert laid the foundations of a mimic kingdom;—Penn, with the power of a prince, stripped himself of authority. The one was naturally an aristocrat of James's time; the other, quite as naturally, a democrat of the transition age of Sidney.
Calvert imagined that mankind stood still; but, Penn believed, that mankind ever moves, or, that like an army under arms, when not marching, it is marking time.
While to Calvert is due the honor of a considerable religious advance on his age, as developed in his charter,—Penn is to be revered for the double glory of civil and perfect religious liberty. Calvert mitigated man's lot by toleration;—Penn expanded the germ of toleration into unconditional freedom.