A Quaker from Cromwell's Army: James Nayler (review)

86 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION We cannot follow Howard PyIe through what his biographer styles " The Middle Ages." His life was a very strenuous one, with brief visits to the little seaside town of Rehoboth, where he delighted in its freedom and rusticity. Piracy attracted him, and he wrote stories such as The Ruby of Kishmoor, in which appears " Mr. Jonathan Rudd, a calm, sober, young Philadelphia Quaker." Single pictures of historical scenes came from his hand, such as " The First Visit of William Penn to America " ; he prepared also decorations for S. Weir Mitchell's Quaker Lady and illustrations for the same author's Hugh Wynne and for Basil King's The Hanging of Mary Dyer. Of Pyle's character and private life we are told that " his life was colored with the spirit of mysticism inherited from his mother. Yet the Quaker simplicity, handed down from generation to generation, remained undiminished under Swedenborgian influences. He retained throughout his life a simplicity of character which was most unusual for one of his versatile genius, and which was probably due to the long tradition of Quakerism which lay behind him." Which illustrates again the saying, " Once a Quaker always a Quaker." A great sorrow came into his life in 1889, in the death at Wilmington of their only son during his parents' visit to Jamaica. The teaching of art in Philadelphia and Wilmington and the work of mural decoration next engaged attention, but not for long. In 1910 he went to Italy to study the old masters and died at Florence on November 9 of the next year. The Chronicle, which we have been mainly following, is adorned with many illustrations, four being in color. The book is a worthy production from the hand of a recent graduate of Haverford College. Norman Penney Bournemouth, England Brailsford, Mabel Richmond. A Quaker from Cromwell's Army: James Nayler. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1927. Pp.200. $2.25. The contrast between the impressive portrait of James Nayler which forms the frontispiece of this volume, and the caricatures of him which appear opposite pages 117 and 185, is no more striking than the contrast between the rest of his life and those few sad months of his decline and fall. Born in 1618, six of his forty-two years were spent in devoted service as a " first publisher of Truth," and only six months were marred by the tragedy of his otherwise blameless and heroic life. But it is precisely these few months which make his career so significant and dramatic. The biography with which we are now favored is the first modern, and indeed the first adequate, life of Nayler that we possess. Based as it is upon original sources and illuminated by the glow of its gifted author's literary style, it is worthy of its subject in every way. Its title and its introductory chapter are significant of the importance which is attached by BOOK REVIEWS87 its author to that strange cradle of Quakerism, Cromwell's army. One half the book is devoted to Nayler's environment and to a very interesting brief account of his life and service down to the time of his fall; the second half gives a detailed and dramatic story of his pitiful lapse, of the savage punishment which the state executed upon him for his "blasphemy," and of the humility and completeness of his own spirit's atonement. James Nayler is generally assumed by Quaker historians to have been second only to George Fox among the early Quaker leaders. His latest biographer accepts this estimate, and affords much evidence of his large ability as a speaker and writer and winner of converts to the new and strange religion. He was apparently a fervent evangelist of the type of George Whitefield even before he was convinced of Quakerism, and grew in fervor and tender eloquence through his strenuous and painful experiences as a Quaker missionary. Some of his writings reveal in a striking way the same traits as his oratory, and move their readers almost to tears by the depth and pathos of the inward experience out of which their author's eloquence arose...