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  • Briefer Notices
  • Henry J. Cadbury
HARRY W. PFUND contributes to The Germanic Review, 14 (1939), 258-269 a historical account of the relation of Goethe and the Quakers. When the poet visited Pyrmont in 1801 with its Friends' meeting and cutlery manufactory he was rather prejudiced against religion; and later, when reporting this visit in 1825, he wrote unfavorably of the Quakers. His interest in clouds however attracted him to the works of Luke Howard, and their common lay position accentuated Goethe's growing sympathy with religion. He solicited an account of Howard's career and views, which kindled Goethe's admiration, as we know by several later references and by the fact that he translated it into German. Finally Goethe's growing admiration for the Quakers was stimulated by his interest in America and especially by reading about Philadelphia and the Quakers in the letters and diary of Duke Bernhard on a visit to the United States (1825-26).
JOHN A. POLLARD writing on "Whittier on the Labor Unions" in The New England Quarterly xii (1939), pp. 99-112, shows the Quaker poet's sympathy with labor in his early articles, and his condemnation of a court's failure to sustain collective bargaining. His editorial on this point is republished from the Essex Gazette of July 23, 1836. These prose pieces anticipate his attitude in "Songs of Labor."
A PAMPHLET by Ann Gidley Lowry entitled "The Story of Flushing Meeting House" is both well written and well illustrated. It gives the history of the house built in 1694 and of the still older Quaker community at Flushing, Long Island. Architectural features and Quaker ideals both interest the author. The pictures include, besides the meeting house (inside, outside, fireplace), the John Bowne house built in 1661. This booklet, prepared in expectation of visitors to the World's Fair, is a model which other meetings might well follow.
AMERICAN "Standard" News, vol. iv, No. 6 (June 1939), has a brief illustrated article on the heating arrangements of the Friends' Meeting House at Flushing, Long Island.
COLERIDGE'S sympathy with Quakerism is well known. In the marginalia to his copy of Cotton Mather's Magnolia described by David Davies, in Huntington Library Quarterly vol. 2 (1939), pp. 233-248, various notes show at least hostility to the New England Puritans. Thus Mather's prejudice against Quakerism is obvious, as Coleridge recognized, in his narration of the witchcraft evidence that a bewitched girl could read only a Quaker book. When Mather describes a long disputation between a Boston minister and two Quakers Coleridge exclaims, "What an ill-mannered Bigot does this Minister approve himself!" Between Thomas Maule and Cotton Mather Coleridge again takes the Quaker's side, concluding:
Why at Tom Maule dost fret & foam
Thy own Book's but a mauling Tome
Add to thy name an R: for rather
A Mauler art thou than a Mather!
S. T. C.
THE Westchester County Historical Society Bulletin x (1934), pp. 34-37, contains an account of "William Purdy of Courtland, Quaker Preacher," by Elliott Baldwin Hunt. Purdy's life was from 1769 to 1847.
THE "Excerpts from the Charles City County Records (1655-1666)" supplied by Robert A. Stewart include as their first instalment, published in Virginia Magazine of History xlii (1934), pp. 341-44, only accounts of Quaker persecutions in 1663-64. The Quakers mentioned are Francis Whittington, Howell Edmonds, Benjamin Travers, and Edward Freeze. The offenses are wearing hats in court or holding Quaker meetings. The penalties are fine or banishment.
"GOSHEN ORTHODOX FRIENDS MEETING" is the subject of an article by Helen W. Shortlidge in Chester County Collections No. 14 (April 1939). The history begins in 1701. The meeting house was transferred to the local grange in 1894, but the burial ground is still used. A list of those interred since 1851 is here included.
A USEFUL kind of publication, of which more examples are in prospect, is the Inventory of Church Archives of Rhode Island: Society of Friends, issued by the Historical Records Survey, Works Progress Administration (1939, 80 pages, obtainable from Moses...

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