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youthful mind with inspiring examples of true greatness, more authentic historians
represent in a light far different."
"More authentic historians" — Dunlap, for instance—do not diminish the " true greatness" of
West; but they explode some of the embellishments with which Gait, in the interest of morality, saw fit to
adorn it. And yet the life of West is best told by including copious extracts from Gait, who received many of
the details from him and whose style is in harmony with his subject.
Benjamin West was born in 1738, at Springfield, a little Pennsylvania settlement, and his
childhood knew all the rigor and simplicity of frontier life; but his family were people of position in
England and of good descent. The first to embrace the Quaker faith was Colonel James West, the companion of
John Hampden, and West's maternal grandfather was a confidential friend of William Penn. When the West family
came to America, in 1699, John, the father of Benjamin, was left to complete his education at the great
school of the Quakers at Uxbridge, and did not join his relatives until 1714. Shortly after his arrival he
married, and as a part of his wife's marriage portion received a negro slave ; but during a voyage to the
West Indies, in the course of trade, he was so shocked by the cruelties of slavery that on his return he
released his slave and continued to debate the subject of slavery with his neighbors at their meetings, until
a resolution was passed " that it was the duty of Christians to give freedom to their slaves." The discussion
spread until, in 1753, it was ultimately established as one of the tenets of the Quakers that no person could
remain a member of their community who held a human creature in slavery. An echo of this faith appeared long
afterward, when the son offered his ample galleries in London for the meetings of the Committee of the
Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade; and what other details have been handed down about John West
show him, though but a storekeeper in a small village, yet a man of character, and
respected.
Benjamin was the youngest child of a large family. On Sept. 28, 1820, Edmund Peckover, a
celebrated preacher of the Quakers, preached in a meeting-house erected by the father of Mrs. West, who was
present and so affected by the fiery and minatory discourse that she gave birth to her infant immediately
after; and
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