Franklin as a Writer
Franklin, as Hume truly said, was the first great man of letters, for whom
Great Britain was beholden to America, and, among his writings, are some
that will always remain classics. But it is a mistake to think of him as in
any sense a professional author. He was entirely accurate when he declared
in the _Autobiography_ that prose-writing had been of great use to him in
the course of his life and a principal means of his advancement; but always
to him a pen was but an implement of action. When it had accomplished its
purpose, he threw it aside as a farmer discards a worn-out plowshare, or a
horse casts a shoe.[56] There is nothing in his writings or his utterances
to show that he ever regarded himself as a literary man, or ever harbored a
thought of permanent literary fame. The only productions of his pen, which
suggest the sandpaper and varnish of a professional writer, are his
Bagatelles, such as _The Craven Street Gazette_ and _The Ephemera_,
composed for the amusement of his friends; and, in writing them, the idea
of permanency was as completely absent from his mind as it was from that
of the Duke of Crillon, when he sent up his balloon in honor of the two
Spanish princes. The greater part of his writings were composed in haste,
and published anonymously, and without revision. And, when once published,
if they did not remain dispersed and neglected, it was only because their
merits were too great for them not to be snatched from the "abhorred abyss
of blank oblivion" by some disciple or friend of his, who had more regard
for posterity than he had. So far as we are aware, no edition of his
scientific essays or other writings was ever in the slightest degree
prompted by any personal concern or request of his. As soon as the didactic
purpose of the earlier chapters of the _Autobiography_ had been gratified
by the composition of those chapters, it was only by incessant proddings
and importunities that he could be induced to bring his narrative down to
as late a period as he did. When Lord Kames expressed a desire to have all
his publications, the only ones on which he could lay his hands were the
_Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind_, _Peopling of Countries,
etc._, the _Account of the New-invented Pennsylvanian Fireplaces_, and some
little magazine sketches. He had had, he wrote Lord Kames, daily
expectations of procuring some of his performances from a friend to whom he
had formerly sent them, when the author was in America, but this friend had
at length told him that he could not find them. "Very mortifying this to an
author," said Franklin, "that his works should so soon be lost!" When
Jefferson called upon him, during his last days, he placed in the former's
hands the valuable manuscript of his negotiations with Lord Howe, and it
was not until he had twice told Jefferson to keep it, in reply to
statements by Jefferson that he would return it, after reading it, that the
recipient could realize that the intention was to turn over the manuscript
to him absolutely. In a letter to Vaughan, he mentions that, after writing
a parable, probably that on Brotherly Love, he laid it aside and had not
seen it for thirty years, when a lady, a few days before, furnished him
with a copy that she had preserved.
The indifference of Franklin to literary reputation is all the more
remarkable in view of the clearness with which he foresaw the increased
patronage that the future had in store for English authors. "I assure you,"
he wrote on one occasion to Hume, "it often gives me pleasure to reflect,
how greatly the _audience_ (if I may so term it) of a good English writer
will, in another century or two, be increased by the increase of English
people in our colonies." Twenty-four years later, he had already lived long
enough to see his prescience in this respect to no little extent verified.
By the way [he wrote to William Strahan], the rapid
Growth and extension of the English language in
America, must become greatly Advantageous to the
book-sellers, and holders of Copy-Rights in England. A
vast audience is assembling there for English Authors
ancient, present, and future, our People doubling every
twenty Years; and this will demand large and of course
profitable Impressions of your most valuable Books. I
would, therefore, if I possessed such rights, entail
them, if such a thing be practicable, upon my
Posterity; for their Worth will be continually
augmenting.
This grave advice was followed by the jolly laugh that was never long
absent from the intercourse between Franklin and Strahan. "This," Franklin
said, "may look a little like Advice, and yet I have drank no _Madeira_
these Ten Months."
The manner in which Franklin acquired the elements of his literary
education is one of the inspiring things in the history of knowledge. At
the age of ten, as we have seen, he was done forever with all schools
except those of self-education and experience; but he had one of those
minds that simply will not be denied knowledge. Even while he was pouring
tallow into his father's moulds, he was reading the _Pilgrim's Progress_,
Burton's _Historical Collections_, "small chapmen's books, and cheap, 40 or
50 in all," Plutarch's _Lives_, Defoe's _Essay on Projects_ and Cotton
Mather's _Essay upon the Good that is to be Devised and Designed by those
who desire to answer the Great end of Life, and to do Good while they
Live_; all books full of wholesome and stimulating food for a hungry mind.
Happily for him, his propensity for reading found ampler scope when his
father bound him over as an apprentice to James Franklin. Here he had
access to better books.
An acquaintance with the apprentices of book-sellers
[he tells us in the _Autobiography_] enabled me
sometimes to borrow a small one, which I was careful to
return soon and clean. Often I sat up in my room
reading the greatest part of the night, when the book
was borrowed in the evening and to be returned early in
the morning, lest it should be missed or wanted.
This clandestine use of what did not belong to him or to his obliging young
friends was an illicit enjoyment; but was one of those offences, we may be
sure, for which the Recording Angel has an expunging tear. More legitimate
was the use that he made of the volumes lent to him by Mr. Matthew Adams,
who had a pretty collection of books, and who frequented the
printing-house, took notice of him and invited him to his library, and very
kindly lent him such books as he chose to read. As we have seen, it was not
long before Benjamin struck a bargain with his brother, by which the
obligation of the latter to board him was commuted into a fixed weekly sum,
which, though only half what had been previously paid by James for his
weekly board, proved large enough to afford the boy a fund for buying books
with. Not only under this arrangement did he contrive to save for this
purpose one half of the sum allowed him by James but also to secure an
additional margin of time for reading.
My brother and the rest [Franklin tells us in the
_Autobiography_] going from the printing-house to their
meals, I remained there alone, and, despatching
presently my light repast, which often was no more than
a bisket or a slice of bread, a handful of raisins or a
tart from the pastry-cook's, and a glass of water, had
the rest of the time till their return for study, in
which I made the greater progress, from that greater
clearness of head and quicker apprehension which
usually attend temperance in eating and drinking.
Then it was that he read Locke's _Essay on Human Understanding_ and the
_Art of Thinking_ by "Messrs. du Port Royal." To the same period belongs
his provoking dalliance with the Socratic method of reasoning.
From reading the works of others to what Sir Fopling Flutter called "the
natural sprouts" of one's own brain is always but a short step for a clever
and ambitious boy. Franklin's first literary ventures were metrical ones,
the lispings that filled the mind of his uncle Benjamin with such glowing
anticipations, and "some little pieces" which excited the commercial
instincts of James Franklin to the point of putting Benjamin to composing
occasional ballads. The subject of one ballad, _The Light House Tragedy_,
was the death by drowning of Captain Worthilake and his two daughters;
another ballad was a sailor's song on the taking of Teach (or Blackbeard),
the flagitious pirate. The opinion of these ballads held by Franklin is
probably just enough, if we may judge by his subsequent irruptions into the
province of Poetry.
They were wretched stuff, in the Grub-Street-ballad
style [he says in the _Autobiography_], and when they
were printed he (James Franklin) sent me about the town
to sell them. The first sold wonderfully, the event
being recent, having made a great noise. This
flattered my vanity; but my father discouraged me by
ridiculing my performances, and telling me verse-makers
were generally beggars. So I escaped being a poet, most
probably a very bad one.
From the doggerel, thus condemned by the hard head of Josiah, Benjamin
turned to prose. Believing that in oral discussion with his friend Collins
on the qualifications of women for learning, he had been borne down rather
by the fluency than the logic of his antagonist, he reduced his arguments
to writing, copied them in a fair hand and sent them to Collins. He
replied, and Franklin rejoined, and no less than three or four letters had
been addressed by each of the friends to the other when the correspondence
happened to fall under the eye of Josiah. Again the son had reason to be
thankful for the candid discernment of the father, for Josiah pointed out
to him that, while he had the advantage of Collins in correct spelling and
pointing (thanks to the printing-house) he fell far short of Collins in
elegance of expression, method and perspicuity, all of which he illustrated
by references to the correspondence.
The son realized the justice of the father's criticisms, and resolved to
amend his faults. The means to which he resorted he has laid before us in
the _Autobiography_:
About this time [he says] I met with an odd volume of
the _Spectator_. It was the third. I had never before
seen any of them. I bought it, read it over and over,
and was much delighted with it. I thought the writing
excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With
this view I took some of the papers, and, making short
hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a
few days, and then, without looking at the book, try'd
to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted
sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been
expressed before, in any suitable words that should
come to hand. Then I compared my _Spectator_ with the
original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected
them. But I found I wanted a stock of words, or a
readiness in recollecting and using them, which I
thought I should have acquired before that time if I
had gone on making verses; since the continual occasion
for words of the same import, but of different length,
to suit the measure, or of different sound for the
rhyme, would have laid me under a constant necessity of
searching for variety, and also have tended to fix that
variety in my mind, and make me master of it. Therefore
I took some of the tales, and turned them into verse;
and, after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the
prose, turned them back again. I also sometimes jumbled
my collection of hints into confusion, and after some
weeks endeavoured to reduce them into the best order,
before I began to form the full sentences and compleat
the paper. This was to teach me method in the
arrangement of thoughts. By comparing my work
afterwards with the original, I discovered many faults
and amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of
fancying that, in certain particulars of small import,
I had been lucky enough to improve the method of the
language, and this encouraged me to think I might
possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer,
of which I was extreamly ambitious. My time for these
exercises and for reading was at night, after work or
before it began in the morning, or on Sundays, when I
contrived to be in the printing-house alone, evading as
much as I could the common attendance on public worship
which my father used to exact of me when I was under
his care, and which indeed I still thought a duty,
though I could not, as it seemed to me, afford time to
practise it.
The next step in Benjamin's literary development was when he contrived to
disguise his handwriting and thrust the first of his Silence Dogood letters
under the door of his brother's printing-house; and we can readily imagine
what his feelings were when the group of contributors to the _Courant_, who
frequented the place, read it and commented on it, in his hearing, and
afforded him what he terms in the _Autobiography_ the exquisite pleasure
of finding that it met with their approbation; and that in their different
guesses at the author none were named but men of some character in the town
for learning and ingenuity. Encouraged by his success, he wrote and
communicated to the _Courant_ in the same furtive way the other letters in
the Silence Dogood series, keeping his secret, he tells us, until his small
fund of sense for such performances was pretty well exhausted, when he
disclosed his authorship, only to arouse the jealousy of the churlish
brother, who, alone of the _Courant_ circle, failed to regard him with
augmented respect. If there was no extrinsic evidence to fix the authorship
of the Dogood letters, their intrinsic characteristics, incipient as they
are, would be enough to disclose the hand of Franklin. The good dame, who
finally succumbed to the rhetoric of her reverend master and protector,
after he had made several fruitless attempts on the more topping part of
her sex, bears very much the same family lineaments as the Anthony Afterwit
and Alice Addertongue of the _Pennsylvania Gazette_. Deprived of her good
husband by inexorable death, when her sun was in its meridian altitude, she
proceeds to gratify her natural inclination for observing and reproving the
faults of others, and to open up her mind in a way that leaves us little
room for doubt as to who the lively, free-spirited and free-spoken boy was
that she concealed beneath her petticoats. "A hearty Lover of the Clergy
and all good Men, and a mortal Enemy to arbitrary Government & unlimited
Power," she was, she assures us in one letter, besides being courteous and
affable, good-humored (unless first provoked) and handsome, and sometimes
witty. In her next paper, she tells us that she had from her youth been
indefatigably studious to gain and treasure up in her mind all useful and
desirable knowledge, especially such as tends to improve the mind and
enlarge the understanding. With this frontispiece, she, from time to time,
delivers her views on various topics with glib vivacity, set off by Latin
quotations. In one letter, she falls asleep in her usual place of
retirement under the Great Apple Tree, and is transported in a dream to the
Temple of Learning (Harvard College), which we can only hope was not quite
so bad as it appeared to be when seen through the distorting medium of her
slumbers. Describing the concourse of outgoing students, she says, "SOME I
perceiv'd took to Merchandizing, others to Travelling, some to one Thing,
some to another, and some to Nothing; and many of them from henceforth, for
want of Patrimony, liv'd as poor as church Mice, being unable to dig, and
asham'd to beg, and to live by their Wits it was impossible." In another
letter, Silence unsparingly lashes the existing system of female education.
"Their Youth," she says, borrowing the words of an "ingenious writer," is
spent to teach them to stitch and sow, or make Baubles. "They are taught to
read indeed and perhaps to write their Names, or so; and that is the Heigth
of a Womans Education."
In another letter, she holds up hoop-petticoats to laughter. If a number of
them, she declared, were well mounted on Noddle's Island, they would look
more like engines of war for bombarding the town than ornaments of the fair
sex; and she concludes by asking her sex, "whether they, who pay no Rates
or Taxes, ought to take up more Room in the King's Highway, than the Men,
who yearly contribute to the Support of the Government."
Another letter makes unmerciful fun of an Elegy upon the much Lamented
Death of Mrs. Mehitebell Kitel, the wife of Mr. John Kitel, of Salem etc.
Two lines,
"Come let us mourn, for we have lost a
Wife, a Daughter, and a Sister,"
affords Silence an opportunity for some merry satire. Contrasting these
lines with Dr. Watts'
"GUNSTON the Just, the Generous, and the Young,"
she says:
The latter (Watts) only mentions three Qualifications
of _one_ Person who was deceased, which therefore could
raise Grief and Compassion but for _One_. Whereas the
former, (_our most excellent Poet_) gives his Reader a
Sort of an Idea of the Death of _Three Persons_, viz.
--a Wife, a Daughter, and a Sister,
which is _Three Times_ as great a Loss as the Death of
_One_, and consequently must raise _Three Times_ as
much Grief and Compassion in the Reader.
It was a pity, Silence added, that such an excellent piece should not be
dignified with a particular name. Seeing that it could not justly be called
either _Epic_, _Saphhic_, _Lyric_ or _Pindaric_, nor any other name yet
invented, she presumed it might (in honour and remembrance of the dead) be
called the Kitelic.
The next letter on freedom of speech was, or purported to be, an extract
from the _London Journal_, and is written in such a totally masculine
spirit that the reader might well have exclaimed like Hugh Evans in the
_Merry Wives of Windsor_: "I like not when a 'oman has a great peard; I spy
a great peard under her muffler." This is one of its masculine sentiments:
"Who ever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing
the Freeness of Speech; a _Thing_ Terrible to Publick Traytors."
And this is another, phrased very much as Grover Cleveland might have
phrased it. "The Administration of Government is nothing else but the
Attendance of the _Trustees of the People_ upon the Interest and Affairs of
the People."
The next letter inveighs against hypocritical pretenders to religion. It
had for some time, Silence says, been a question with her whether a
commonwealth suffers more by hypocritical pretenders to religion, or by the
openly profane; but she is inclined to think that the hypocrite is the most
dangerous person of the two, especially if he sustains a post in the
Government, and his conduct is considered as it regards the public. The
local application of these remarks to Boston at the time could be left to
take care of itself.
The next letter gives us another peep under Silence's petticoats, for it
advances a plan for the insurance of widows, worked out with actuarial
precision, and bearing the unmistakable earmarks of the projecting spirit
of the founder of the Junto. "For my own Part," Silence ends, "I have
nothing left to live on, but Contentment and a few Cows; and tho' I cannot
expect to be reliev'd by this Project, yet it would be no small
Satisfaction to me to See it put in Practice for the Benefit of Others."
The next letter contains a missive from Margaret After cast, a forlorn
Virgin, well stricken in years and repentance, to Silence, in which the
writer, prompted by the provision for widows proposed by Silence, begs her
to form a project also for the relief of "all those penitent Mortals of the
fair Sex, that are like to be punish'd with their Virginity until old Age,
for the Pride and Insolence of their Youth."
The next letter is a clever discourse on drunkenness. It hints at the truth
that Franklin afterwards insisted upon in the "Dialogue between Horatio and
Philocles" that we must stint sensual pleasure to really enjoy it, and sets
forth a vocabulary of cant terms for intoxication similar to that
subsequently published by him in the _Pennsylvania Gazette_.
The next letter is on the forbidding subject of night-walkers. The
familiarity that it exhibits with the peripatetic side of Boston Common
after dark at that day makes it a little difficult for us to understand why
Franklin should ever have had occasion to tell us in the _Autobiography_,
as he does, how on his second voyage from Boston to New York, a grave,
sensible, matronlike Quakeress rescued him from the clutches of two young
women, who afterwards proved to be a couple of thievish strumpets.
The final letter in the series is on the danger of religious zeal, if
immoderate.
We have referred to these letters at some length, not only because they are
not too immature to be even now read with pleasure for their wit and humor,
but because they help to give us a still more faithful idea of the
rebellious youth of Franklin, which, if it had not been so full of scornful
protest against the whole system of New England Puritanism, might have
shaded off, with the chastening effects of time, into too passive a type of
liberalism for such a career as his.
From the Dogood letters Benjamin passed as we have seen to the editorship
of the _Courant_ and to the gibes at the Boston clergy and magistracy,
which ended in his ignominious flight from that city. But never was there a
time in his youth, however restive under the check-rein, when his love of
books was not the chief resource of his life. When on his return from
Boston to Philadelphia, after receiving his father's blessing, it was the
fact that he had a great many books with him which led Governor Burnet of
New York to send for him, and to show him his large library, and to
discourse with him at considerable length about books and authors. He had
previously begun to have "some acquaintance among the young people" of
Philadelphia "that were lovers of reading," and subsequently came those
academic strolls with Osborne, Watson and Ralph through the woods along the
Schuylkill. And later even London, with all its tumult and dissipation,
could not long extinguish his thirst for the sweet, cool wells of human
thought and sentiment from which the soul of a gifted boy drinks with such
passionate eagerness. Circulating libraries were unknown at that time, but
he agreed on reasonable terms with Wilcox, a bookseller, with an immense
collection of second-hand books, whose shop was next door to his place of
lodging in Little Britain, that he might take home and read and return any
of his wares. We have already quoted the passages in the _Autobiography_ in
which he tells us that, during the eighteen months that he was in London in
his youth, he spent little upon himself except in seeing plays, and for
books; and that he read considerably.
The _Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain_, which he
wrote while in London, of little value as it was in itself, yet also aided
in confirming his literary tendencies; for it arrested the attention of
Lyons, the author of _The Infallibility of Human Judgment_, who introduced
him to Bernard Mandeville, the author of the _Fable of the Bees_, "a most
facetious, entertaining companion," and Dr. Henry Pemberton, the author of
_A View of Sir I. Newton's Philosophy_.
The love of reading, thus acquired by Franklin in early life, never
deserted him, and was afterwards strengthened by his own ever-increasing
library, which, before his death, became so large that he had to build a
spacious room for its reception at his home in Philadelphia, the books
owned by the other members of the Junto, the extensive library of James
Logan at Stenton, and the collections of the Philadelphia Library Company.
Even when his private business was too exacting to allow him time for any
other form of recreation, he still found time for reading, including the
acquirement of several modern languages, and the consequence was that, when
he began to write in earnest, he was well supplied with all the materials
for literary workmanship.
While Franklin never became a professional writer, he was very scrupulous
about the typographical dress of what he wrote and not a little of a
purist in his choice of words. Nor does he seem to have been less averse
than authors usually are to editorial mutilation. Among his letters is one
to Woodfall, the printer of Junius' Letters, asking him to take care that
the compositor observed "strictly the Italicking, Capitalling and Pointing"
of the copy enclosed with the letter. Referring in a letter to William
Franklin to a reprint in the _London Chronicle_ of his "Edict by the King
of Prussia," he said:
It is reprinted in the _Chronicle_, where you will see
it, but stripped of all the capitaling and italicing,
that intimate the allusions and mark the emphasis of
written discourses, to bring them as near as possible
to those spoken: printing such a piece all in one even
small character, seems to me like repeating one of
Whitefield's sermons in the monotony of a schoolboy.
On another occasion he was led by the alterations made in the text of one
of his papers to write to William Franklin in these terms: "The editor of
that paper, one Jones, seems a Grenvillian, or is very cautious, as you
will see by his corrections and omissions. He has drawn the teeth and pared
the nails of my paper, so that it can neither scratch nor bite."
Among the many delightful letters of Franklin is one that he wrote in his
extreme old age to Noah Webster, acknowledging the receipt of a copy of the
latter's _Dissertations on the English Language_, and applauding his zeal
for preserving the purity of the English language both in its expressions
and pronunciation; and in correcting the popular errors into which several
of the States were continually falling with respect to both. In this
letter, the writer again takes occasion to reprobate the use in New England
of the word "improved" in the sense of "employed." The word in that
signification appears to have been decidedly obnoxious to him, for he had
previously banned it in a letter to Jared Eliot. Among the ludicrous
instances that he gave in his letter to Webster of its use in its perverted
sense was an obituary statement to the effect that a certain deceased
country gentleman had been for more than thirty years _improved_ as a
justice of the peace. He also found, he said, that, during his absence in
France, several newfangled words had been introduced into the parliamentary
vocabulary of America, such as the verb formed from the substantive
"Notice," as "_I should not have NOTICED this, were it not that the
Gentleman_, &c.," the verb formed from the substantive "Advocate," as "_the
Gentleman who ADVOCATES or has ADVOCATED that Motion_, &c.," and the verb
formed from the substantive "progress," the most awkward and abominable of
the three, as "_the committee, having PROGRESSED resolved to adjourn_." He
also found that the word "opposed," though not a new word, was used in a
new manner, as "_the Gentlemen who are OPPOSED to this Measure_." From
these verbal criticisims he passed to the advantages that had inured to the
French language from obtaining the universal currency in Europe previously
enjoyed by Latin. It was perhaps, he thought, owing to the fact that
Voltaire's treatise on Toleration was written in French that it had exerted
so sudden and so great an effect on the bigotry of Europe as almost
entirely to disarm it. The English language bid fair to occupy a place only
second to that of the French, and the effort therefore should be to relieve
it still more of all the difficulties, however small, which discouraged its
more general diffusion. A book, ill-printed, or a pronunciation in
speaking, not well articulated, would render a sentence unintelligible,
which from a clear print, or a distinct speaker, would have been
immediately comprehended.
Instead of diminishing, however, the obstacles to the extension of the
English language, Franklin declared, had increased. The practice, for
illustration, of beginning all substantives with a capital letter, which
had done so much to promote intelligibility, had been laid aside. And so,
from the same fondness for an even and uniform appearance, had been the
practice of italicizing important words, or words which should be
emphasized when read. Another innovation was the use of the short round s
instead of the long one which had formerly served so well to distinguish a
word readily by its varied aspect. Certainly the omission of these
prominent letters made the line appear more even, but it rendered it less
immediately legible; as the paring all men's noses might smooth and level
their faces, but would render their physiognomies less distinguishable. All
these, Franklin said, were improvements backwards, and classed with them
too should be the modern fancy that gray printing--read with difficulty by
old eyes--unless in a very strong light and with good glasses, was more
beautiful than black. A comparison between a volume of the _Gentleman's
Magazine_, printed between the years 1731 and 1740, and one printed in the
last ten years would demonstrate the contrary. Lord Chesterfield pleasantly
remarked this difference to Faulkener, the printer of the _Dublin Journal_,
when he was vainly making encomiums on his own paper as the most complete
of any in the world. "But, Mr. Faulkener," said my Lord, "don't you think
it might be still farther improved by using Paper and Ink not quite so near
of a Colour"? Another point in favor of clear and distinct printing was
that it afforded the eye, when it was being read aloud, an opportunity to
take a look forward in time to supply the voice with the proper modulations
for coming words. But, if words were obscurely printed or disguised by
omitting the capitals and the long s, or otherwise, the reader was apt to
modulate wrong, and, finding that he had done so, would be obliged to go
back, and begin the sentence again, with a loss of pleasure to his
hearers.
Two features, however, of the old system of printing did not meet with the
approval of Franklin. It was absurd to place the interrogation point at the
end of a sentence where it is not descried until it is too late for the
inflection of interrogation to be given. The practice of the Spanish of
putting this point at the beginning of the sentence was more sensible. The
same reasoning was applicable to the practice of putting the stage
direction "aside" at the end of a sentence.
Nice, however, as were the prejudices of Franklin with respect to the use
of words, some of his own did not escape the vigilant purism of Hume, who,
notwithstanding his admiration for Franklin, as the first great man of
letters produced by America, was, where fastidious diction was concerned,
not unlike John Randolph of Roanoke, whose exquisite fidelity to correct
English impelled him even on his death-bed, when asked whether he _lay_
easily, to reply with marked emphasis, "I _lie_ as easily as a dying man
can." After reading Franklin's Canada pamphlet and essay on Population,
Hume took exception to several of his expressions; as is shown by one of
the latter's letters to him.
I thank you [wrote Franklin] for your friendly
admonition relating to some unusual words in the
pamphlet. It will be of service to me. The "_pejorate_"
and the "_colonize_," since they are not in common use
here, I give up as bad; for certainly in writings
intended for persuasion and for general information,
one can not be too clear; and every expression in the
least obscure is a fault. The "_unshakeable_" too,
though clear, I give up as rather low. The introducing
new words, where we are already possessed of old ones
sufficiently expressive, I confess must be generally
wrong, as it tends to change the language; yet, at the
same time, I can not but wish the usage of our tongue
permitted making new words, when we want them, by
composition of old ones whose meanings are already well
understood. The German allows of it, and it is a
common practice with their writers. Many of our
present English words were originally so made; and many
of the Latin words. In point of clearness, such
compound words would have the advantage of any we can
borrow from the ancient or from foreign languages. For
instance, the word _inaccessible_, though long in use
among us, is not yet, I dare say, so universally
understood by our people, as the word _uncomeatable_
would immediately be, which we are not allowed to
write. But I hope with you, that we shall always in
America make the best English of this Island our
standard, and I believe it will be so.
Franklin has left behind him his own conception of what constitutes a good
piece of writing.
To be good [he says] it ought to have a tendency to
benefit the reader, by improving his virtue or his
knowledge. But, not regarding the intention of the
author, the method should be just; that is, it should
proceed regularly from things known to things unknown,
distinctly and clearly without confusion. The words
used should be the most expressive that the language
affords, provided that they are the most generally
understood. Nothing should be expressed in two words
that can be as well expressed in one; that is, no
synonymes should be used, or very rarely, but the whole
should be as short as possible, consistent with
clearness; the words should be so placed as to be
agreable to the ear in reading; summarily it should be
smooth, clear and short, for the contrary qualities are
displeasing.
Though entirely familiar, as we know from one of his letters, with the fate
that befell Gil Blas, when he was so imprudent as to comply with the
invitation of his master, the Archbishop, Franklin did not shrink from the
peril of telling Benjamin Vaughan at his request what the faults of his
writings were; and the terms in which he performed this delicate and
hazardous office were suggested in part at least by his own methods of
composition.
Your language [he told Vaughan] seems to me to be good
and pure, and your sentiments generally just; but your
style of composition wants perspicuity, and this I
think owing principally to a neglect of method. What I
would therefore recommend to you is, that, before you
sit down to write on any subject, you would spend some
days in considering it, putting down at the same time,
in short hints, every thought which occurs to you as
proper to make a part of your intended piece. When you
have thus obtained a collection of the thoughts,
examine them carefully with this view, to find which of
them is properest to be presented _first_ to the mind
of the reader that he, being possessed of that, may the
more easily understand it, and be better disposed to
receive what you intend for the _second_; and thus I
would have you put a figure before each thought, to
mark its future place in your composition. For so,
every preceding proposition preparing the mind for that
which is to follow, and the reader often anticipating
it, he proceeds with ease, and pleasure, and
approbation, as seeming continually to meet with his
own thoughts. In this mode you have a better chance for
a perfect production; because the mind attending first
to the sentiments alone, next to the method alone, each
part is likely to be better performed, and I think too
in less time.
The writings of Franklin as a whole were true to his literary ideals, for
they are, as a rule, smooth, clear and short; and the paper of preliminary
hints that he drew up for the composition of the _Autobiography_ was in
accord with his advice to Vaughan in regard to the value of such aids to
perspicuity. His familiar letters, agreeable as they are, bear evidence at
times of haste and lack of revision, and even his more informal writings,
other than letters, occasionally betray a certain sort of carelessness of
construction and expression. This is conspicuously true of the
_Autobiography_, and, indeed, it is one of the merits of that work, so
perfectly is it in keeping with its easy, meandering narrative. But,
generally speaking, the compositions of Franklin are fully in harmony with
his best standards of literary accomplishment. They are flowing and
euphonious, moving with a steady, smooth and sometimes powerful, current
from things known to things unknown, distinctly and lucidly without
confusion. They are as clear as a trout stream. If one of his sentences is
read a second time, it is not for his meaning, but merely for a renewal of
the gratification that the mind derives from a thought presented free from
the slightest trace of intercepting obscurity. They are so concise that the
endeavor to make an abstract of one of them is likely to result in a
sacrifice of brevity. But smoothness, clearness, and brevity, are far from
being the only merits of Franklin's writings. He was not richly endowed
with imagination; though he was by no means destitute of that sovereign
faculty; placid and sober as the ordinary operations of his mind were. But
Fancy, the graceful sister of Imagination, Invention, Wit and Humor, and
remarkable powers of statement and reasoning, all, except humor in its more
wayward moods, under the complete sway of a sound judgment, gave life and
strength to almost all that he wrote. His similes and metaphors are often
strikingly original and apt; never more so than when they light up with a
sudden flash the dark core of some abstruse scientific problem. A vivacity
of spirits that nothing could long depress, accompanied by a quick but
kindly sense of the ludicrous rises like bubbles of mellow wine to the
surface of his intimate letters, and other lighter compositions; and, when
associated with conceptions lured from the bright heaven of invention, and
elaborated with the utmost finish, as in the case of his Bagatelles,
imparts to his productions a quality that does not belong to any but the
best creations of literary genius. It is interesting to note how even the
most intractable subject, the new-invented Pennsylvania fireplace, smoky
chimneys, interest calculations become suffused with some sort of
intellectual charm, born of absolute transparency of speech, if nothing
else, as soon as they pass through the luminous and tapestried cells of
his spacious mind. That mind, indeed, like all minds of the same
comprehensive character, in which the balance has not been lost between the
subjective and objective faculties, was prone to see everything in large
pictorial outlines. Fable, epilogue, parable, a story that was not so much
the jest of a moment as the wisdom of all time, a historical incident, that
pointed some grave moral, or enforced some invaluable truth, came naturally
to his mind as they might well do to the minds of all men who are
creed-founders, or teachers, in any sense, on a large scale, of the mass of
men, as he was. How naturally such methods of instruction belonged to him
is well illustrated in the story told of him by John Adams. One evening, at
a social gathering, shortly before he left England, at the close of his
second mission to that country, a gentleman expressed the opinion that
writers like AEsop and La Fontaine had exhausted the resources of fable.
Franklin, so far from concurring with this view, declared that many new and
instructive fables could still be invented, and, when asked whether he
could think of one, replied that, if he was furnished with pen and paper,
he would produce one forthwith. The pen and paper were handed to him, and,
in a few minutes, he summed up the existing relations between England and
America in this fable:
Once upon a time, an eagle, scaling round a farmer's
barn, and espying a hare, darted down upon him like a
sunbeam, seized him in his claws, and remounted with
him in the air. He soon found that he had a creature of
more courage and strength than a hare; for which,
notwithstanding the keenness of his eyesight, he had
mistaken a cat. The snarling and scrambling of the prey
was very inconvenient; and, what was worse, she had
disengaged herself from his talons, grasped his body
with her four limbs, so as to stop his breath, and
seized fast hold of his throat with her teeth. "Pray,"
said the eagle, "let go your hold, and I will release
you." "Very fine," said the cat, "I have no fancy to
fall from this height, and be crushed to death. You
have taken me up, and you shall stoop, and let me
down." The eagle thought it necessary to stoop
accordingly.
In the course of the preceding pages, we have had occasion to refer at
considerable length to not a few of Franklin's writings, but by no means to
all. Among the best of his published pamphlets, is the one entitled _The
Interest of Great Britain considered with regard to her Colonies and the
Acquisitions of Canada and Guadaloupe_. Remarkable as it may now seem, when
the peace of 1763 between Great Britain and France was approaching, there
was some division of opinion in the former country as to whether she should
insist upon the cession by France to her of Canada or Guadeloupe, then one
of the rich sugar islands of the West Indies; and the object of this
pamphlet was to establish the superior claims of Canada. It is written with
great lucidity and force of argument, and is especially valuable for its
revelations of the extent to which the acquisition of Canada by England was
opposed in England for fear that it would tend to augment the power and
precipitate the independence of the American Colonies. Richard Jackson is
alleged to have had a share in its composition, exactly what Benjamin
Vaughan was unable to say after a careful investigation before the
publication of his edition of Franklin's writings in 1779. For our part, we
find it difficult to believe that he could have had any considerable share
in its production. Internal evidences of authorship are undoubtedly
misleading, but it is hard to read this paper, so similar to Franklin's
other pamphlets in point of peculiarities of diction and method without
exclaiming, "St. Dunstan or the Devil!" Its intimate, nay perfect,
familiarity with Indian habits and characteristics could not well have been
possessed by anyone who had never personally mixed with the Indians, and
formed his knowledge of them from his own and other first-hand information.
The arguments, too, employed in the pamphlet to allay English jealousy of
colonial aggrandizement, are the same that are found scattered through
Franklin's other writings. There is also the fact that the authorship of
the paper is referred to in the paper itself throughout in the first person
singular. There is also the fact that in the same letter to Hume, in which
Franklin disclaims the authorship of the _Historical Review_, he told him,
in reply to one of his criticisms, that he gave up as rather low the word
"unshakeable," used in the Canada pamphlet, but said nothing to indicate
that the pamphlet was not wholly his own. More conclusive are the words in
the paper of hints upon which the composition of the _Autobiography_ was
based. "_Canada delenda est_. My Pamphlet. Its reception and effect."
Certainly a man, whose relations to his own productions were always marked
by an uncommon degree of modesty, if not of indifference, and whose
generosity in awarding due credit to the labors of others was one of his
most striking and laudable qualities, was scarcely the man to have used
such words as these about a pamphlet, mainly or largely the work of another
hand. There is besides the fact that in the Franklin collection of the
Pennsylvania Historical Society there is a copy of the pamphlet indorsed in
the handwriting of Franklin as presented "to the Rev. Dr. Mayhew, from his
humble servt, the Author."
In view of these circumstances we should say that the probabilities
decidedly are that the connection of Jackson with the pamphlet, whatever it
may have been, was of a purely subordinate character.
The papers, written by Franklin from time to time during the controversy
between Great Britain and her Colonies, before the sword grew too impatient
to remain in its scabbard, such as his letters to the _London Chronicle_
and the _London Public Advertiser_, his Answers to Strahan's _Queries
respecting American Affairs_, his essay on _Toleration in Old England and
New England_, his _Tract relative to the Affair of Hutchinson's Letters_,
and his _Account of Negotiations in London for effecting a Reconciliation
between Great Britain and the American Colonies_ were, taken as a whole,
pamphleteering or narration of a very interesting and effective order. The
substance of the majority of them is found in his Examination before the
House of Commons, as the quintessence of most that is best in _Poor
Richard's Almanac_ is found in Father Abraham's Speech. They are written,
as a rule, in a singularly clear and readable style, present with unusual
skill and cogency all the points of the colonial argument, and display the
insight of an almost faultlessly honest and sane intelligence into the true
obligations and interests of the mother country and her disaffected
children. Among these graver productions, Franklin also contributed to the
American controversy, in addition to the humorous letter to the press, in
which he held up to English ignorance of America, as one of the finest
spectacles in nature, the grand leap of the whale, in his chase of the cod
up Niagara Falls, two papers worthy of the satirical genius of Swift. One
is his _Edict by the King of Prussia_ and the other is his _Rules by Which
a Great Empire May be Reduced to a Small One_. In the first piece,
Frederick the Great is gravely credited with an edict, in which, after
reciting that Great Britain was colonized in the beginning by subjects of
his renowned ducal ancestors, led by Hengist, Horsa, Hella, Uff, Cerdicus,
Ida and others, he proceeds to impose _seriatim_ upon the English
descendants of these German colonists in terms, exactly like those employed
by the prohibitory and restrictive statutes of Great Britain, bearing upon
the commerce and industry of America, all the disabilities and burdens
under which America labored. The parallel is sustained with unbroken spirit
and the happiest irony from beginning to end. After all the manacles by
which the freedom of America was restrained have been duly fastened by the
arbitrary mandates of the edict upon Great Britain herself, it concludes
with these words:
We flatter ourselves, that these our royal regulations
and commands will be thought just and reasonable by our
much-favoured colonists in England; the said
regulations being copied from their statutes of 10 and
11 William III. c. 10, 5 Geo. II. c. 22, 23 Geo. II. c.
29, 4 Geo. I. c. 11, and from other equitable laws made
by their parliaments; or from instructions given by
their Princes; or from resolutions of both Houses,
entered into for the good government of their _own
colonies in Ireland and America_.
The second paper commences in this manner:
"An ancient Sage boasted, that, tho' he could not fiddle, he knew how to
make a _great city_ of a _little one_. The science that I, a modern
simpleton, am about to communicate, is the very reverse." Then, assuming as
a postulate that a great empire, like a great cake, is most easily
diminished at the edges, the paper goes on to point out one by one as the
best means for reducing such an empire to a small one the very British
policies and abuses that were then producing incurable disaffection in the
mind of America, and menacing the power and prestige of Great Britain
herself. These two papers, though clothed in forms that belong to
literature rather than to politics, assert the whole case of the Colonies
against Great Britain almost, if not altogether, as fully as the
Declaration of Independence afterwards did. They have in every respect the
polished completeness given by Franklin to all the productions of his pen
that called for the exercise of true literary art, and deserve to be
included in any separate publication of the best creations of his literary
genius. They both met with the popular favor that they merited. The Rules
was read with such eagerness that it was reprinted in the _Public
Advertiser_ at the request of many individuals and some associations of
individuals, and this notwithstanding the fact that it had been copied in
several other newspapers and _The Gentleman's Magazine_. So great was the
demand for the issue of the _Advertiser_, in which the Edict appeared,
that, the day after its appearance, Franklin's clerk could obtain but two
copies of it, though he endeavored to obtain more both at the office of the
_Advertiser_ and elsewhere. Its authorship being unknown except to a few of
the writer's friends, he had the pleasure besides, he tells us, of hearing
it spoken of in the highest terms as the keenest and severest piece that
had been published in London for a long time. Lord Mansfield, he was
informed, said of it that it was very able and artful indeed, and would do
mischief by giving in England a bad impression of the measures of
government, and in the Colonies by encouraging them in their contumacy.
Among the persons taken in by its apparent genuineness was Paul Whitehead.
I was down at Lord Le Despencer's [Franklin wrote to
William Franklin] when the post brought that day's
papers. Mr. Whitehead was there, too, (Paul Whitehead,
the author of _Manners_,) who runs early through all
the papers, and tells the company what he finds
remarkable. He had them in another room, and we were
chatting in the breakfast parlour, when he came running
in to us, out of breath, with the paper in his hand.
Here! says he, here's news for ye! _Here's the King of
Prussia, claiming a right to this kingdom!_ All stared,
and I as much as anybody; and he went on to read it.
When he had read two or three paragraphs, a gentleman
present said, _Damn his impudence, I dare say, we shall
hear by next post that he is upon his march with one
hundred thousand men to back this._ Whitehead who is
very shrewd, soon after began to smoke it, and looking
in my face said, _I'll be hanged if this is not some of
your American jokes upon us._ The reading went on, and
ended with abundance of laughing, and a general verdict
that it was a fair hit; and the piece was cut out of
the paper and preserved in My Lord's collection.
There are some humorous passages in other contributions made by Franklin,
in one assumed character or another, to the American controversy. The
dialogue as well as the fable was, as the reader is aware, one of his
striking methods of arresting popular attention when he wished to make an
impression upon the popular mind. In an anonymous letter to the _Public
Advertiser_, he undertook to defend Dr. Franklin from the charge of
ingratitude to the Ministry, which had, it was alleged, given him the Post
Office of America, offered him a post of five hundred a year in the Salt
Office, if he would relinquish the interests of his country and made his
son a colonial governor. As it was a settled point in government in England
that every man had his price, it was plain, the letter declared, that the
English Ministers were bunglers in their business, and had not given him
enough. Their Master had as much reason to be angry with them as Rodrigue
in the play with his apothecary for not effectually poisoning Pandolpho,
and they must probably make use of the Apothecary's Justification, as urged
in the following colloquy:
SCENE IV. _Rodrigue_ and _Fell_, the Apothecary
_Rodrigue._ You promised to have this Pandolpho upon
his Bier in less than a Week; 'tis more than a Month
since, and he still walks and stares me in the face.
_Fell._ True and yet I have done my best Endeavours. In
various ways I have given the Miscreant as much Poison
as would have kill'd an Elephant. He has swallow'd Dose
after Dose; far from hurting him, he seems the better
for it. He hath a wonderfully strong Constitution. I
find I can not kill him but by cutting his Throat, and
that, as I take it, is not my Business.
_Rodrigue._ Then it must be mine.
Another letter, signed "A Londoner," illustrates the difficulty which the
sober good-sense of Franklin, always disposed to reduce things to their
material terms, experienced in understanding the recklessness with which
the British Government was hazarding the commercial value of the colonies.
To us in the Way of Trade comes now, and has long come
[he said] all the superlucration arising from their
Labours. But will our reviling them as Cheats,
Hypocrites, Scoundrels, Traitors, Cowards, Tyrants,
&c., &c., according to the present Court Mode in all
our Papers, make them more our Friends, more fond of
our Merchandise? Did ever any Tradesmen succeed, who
attempted to drub Customers into his Shop? And will
honest JOHN BULL, the Farmer, be long satisfied with
Servants, that before his Face attempt to kill his
_Plow Horses?_
In his eager desire to influence public sentiment in England in behalf of
the Colonies, Franklin even devised and distributed a rude copper plate
engraving, visualizing the woful condition to which Great Britain would be
reduced, if she persisted in her harsh and unwise conduct towards her
colonies. Many impressions of this engraving were struck off at his request
on the cards which he occasionally used in writing his notes, and the
design he also had printed for circulation on half sheets of paper with an
explanation and a moral of his composition. The details of the
illustration, which are all duly elucidated in the explanation, are those
of abject and irredeemable ruin. The limbs of Britannia, duly labelled
Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York and New England respectively, lie
scattered about her, and she herself, with her eyes and arm stumps,
uplifted to Heaven, is seen sliding off the globe, with a streamer
inscribed _Date Obolum Bellisario_ thrown across all that remains of her
legs. Her shield, which she is unable to handle, lies useless by her side.
The leg, labelled New England, has been transfixed by her lance. The hand
of the arm, labelled Pennsylvania, has released its grasp upon a small
spray of laurel. The English oak has lost its crown, and stands a bare
trunk with briars and thorns at its feet, and a single dry branch sticks
out from its side. In the background are Britannia's ships with brooms at
their topmastheads denoting that they are for sale. The moral of the whole
was that the Thames and the Ohio, Edinburgh and Dublin were all one, and
that invidious discriminations in favor of one part of the Empire to the
prejudice of the rest could not fail to be attended with the most
disastrous consequences to the whole State.
Nothing produced by Franklin between the date of his return from his second
mission to England and his departure from America for France needs to be
noticed. The two or three papers from his pen, which belong to this period,
are distinctly below his ordinary standards of composition. Nor are any of
the graver writings composed by him during the remainder of his life with
some exceptions very noteworthy. In one, his comparison of Great Britain
and the United States in regard to the basis of credit in the two
countries, he presented with no little ability the proposition that, by
reason of general industry, frugality, ability, prudence and virtue,
America was a much safer debtor than Britain; to say nothing of the
satisfaction that generous minds were bound to feel in reflecting that by
loans to America they were opposing tyranny, and aiding the cause of
liberty, which was the cause of all mankind. The object of this paper was
to forward the loan of two millions of pounds sterling that the United
States were desirous of procuring abroad. Unfortunately, the matter was one
not to be settled by argument but by the Bourse, which has a barometric
reasoning of its own. In another paper, thrown into the form of a
catechism, Franklin, by a series of clever questions and answers, brings to
the attention of the world the fact that it would take one hundred and
forty-eight years, one hundred and nine days and twenty-two hours for a
man to count the English national debt, though he counted at the rate of
one hundred shillings per minute, during twelve hours of each day. That the
shillings, making up this enormous sum, would weigh sixty-one millions,
seven hundred and fifty-two thousand, four hundred and seventy-six Troy
pounds, that it would take three hundred and fourteen ships, of one hundred
tons each, or thirty-one thousand, four hundred and fifty-two carts to move
them, and that, if laid close together in a straight line, they would
stretch more than twice around the circumference of the earth, are other
facts elicited by the questions of the catechism. It concludes in this
manner:
Q. When will government be able to pay the principal?
A. When there is more money in England's treasury than
there is in all Europe.
Q. And when will that be?
A. Never.
This was very ingenious and clever, and has been imitated a hundred times
over since by _ad captandum_ statisticians, but it needed an interest
default on the part of John Bull to make it effective.
Franklin's conceit in the Edict that Saxony was as much the mother country
of England as England was of America was, it must be admitted, made to do
rather more than its share of service. It reappeared in his _Vindication
and Offer from Congress to Parliament_, when, in repelling the charge that
America was ungrateful to England, he said that there was much more reason
for retorting that charge on Britain which not only never contributed any
aid, nor afforded, by an exclusive commerce, any advantages, to Saxony,
_her_ mother country, but no longer since than the last war, without the
least provocation, subsidized the King of Prussia, while he ravaged that
mother country, and carried fire and sword into its capital, the fine City
of Dresden.
The same conceit also reappeared a second time in the _Dialogue between
Britain, France, Spain, Holland, Saxony and America_, which he wrote soon
after he arrived in France as one of our envoys. In this lively dialogue,
Britain beseeches Spain, France and Holland successively not to supply
America with arms. Spain reminds her of her intervention in behalf of the
Dutch, and expresses surprise at her impudence. France reminds her of her
intervention in behalf of the Huguenots, and tells her that she must be a
little silly, and Holland ends by informing her defiantly that, with the
prospect of a good market for brimstone, she, Holland, would make no
scruple of even sending her ships to Hell, and supplying the Devil with it.
America then takes a hand, and denounces Britain as a bloodthirsty bully,
to which Britain replies as quickly as her choking rage will permit by
denouncing America as a wicked--Whig-Presbyterian--serpent. To this America
rejoins with the statement that she will not surrender her liberty and
property but with her life, and some additional statements which cause
Britain to exclaim: "You impudent b--h! Am not I your Mother Country? Is
that not a sufficient Title to your Respect and Obedience?" At this point
Saxony, for the first time breaks in:
"_Mother Country!_ Hah, hah, he! What Respect have
_you_ the front to claim as a Mother Country? You know
that _I_ am _your_ Mother Country, and yet you pay me
none. Nay, it is but the other day, that you hired
Ruffians to rob me on the Highway, and burn my House.
For shame! Hide your Face and hold your Tongue. If you
continue this Conduct, you will make yourself the
Contempt of Europe!"
This is too much for even the assurance of the dauntless termagant who,
before the American war was over, was to be engaged in conflict at one time
with every one of the other parties to the dialogue except Saxony.
"O Lord," she exclaims in despair, "where are my
friends?" The question does not remain long unanswered.
"_France, Spain, Holland, and Saxony, all together_.
Friends! Believe us, you have none, nor ever will have
any, 'till you mend your Manners. How can we, who are
your Neighbours, have any regard for you, or expect any
Equity from you, should your Power increase, when we
see how basely and unjustly you have us'd both _your
own Mother--and your own Children_?"
With such rollicking fun, did Franklin, beguile his Gibeonite tasks.
A letter of information to those who would remove to America, an essay on
the _Elective Franchises enjoyed by the Small Boroughs in England_, the
three essays on Smoky Chimneys, the New Stove, and Maritime Topics, _The
Retort Courteous_, in which some pithy reasons were given why Americans
were slow in paying their old debts to British merchants, the _Observations
Relative to the Intentions of the Original Founders of the Academy in
Philadelphia_, the _Address of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the
Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in
Bondage_, the _Plan for Improving the Condition of the Free Blacks_, the
essay on _The Internal State of America_ and the paper on _Good Whig
Principles_ make up the bulk of the graver pamphlets and papers written by
Franklin between the beginning of his mission to France and his death.
Some, if not all, of them have already come in for our attention, and most
of them invite no special comment. All, like everything that he wrote, even
the _marginalia_ on the books that he read, have some kind of salt in them
that keeps them sweet, assert itself as time will.
Other serious papers of Franklin, not inspired by political motives, belong
to an earlier date, and, with the exception of those, to which we have more
than barely referred in previous chapters of this book, call for a word of
comment. Two, _The Hints for Those that would be Rich_ and the _Advice to a
Young Tradesman_ are merely echoes of _Poor Richard's Almanac_ but are good
examples of the teachings that make Franklin the most effective of all
propagandists. "He that loses 5s. not only loses that Sum, but all the
Advantage that might be made by turning it in Dealing, which, by the time
that a young Man becomes old, amounts to a comfortable Bag of Money." This
is a typical sentence taken from the Hints. After reading such a discourse
as the _Advice to a Young Tradesman_, it is easy enough to see why it was
that pecuniary truisms took on new life when vitalized by the mind of
Franklin. Money he tells the young tradesman is of the prolific, generating
nature. "He that kills a breeding sow, destroys all her offspring to the
thousandth generation. He that murders a crown, destroys all that it might
have produced, even scores of pounds." The young novice is also told that
the most trifling actions that affect a man's credit are to be regarded.
"The sound of your hammer at five in the morning, or nine at night, heard
by a creditor, makes him easy six months longer; but, if he sees you at a
billiard-table, or hears your voice at a tavern, when you should be at
work, he sends for his money the next day." The paper ends with this
pointed sermon:
In short, the way to wealth, if you desire it, is as
plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly on two
words, _industry_ and _frugality_; that is, waste
neither _time_ nor _money_, but make the best use of
both. Without industry and frugality nothing will do,
and with them everything. He that gets all he can
honestly, and saves all he gets (necessary expenses
excepted) will certainly become _rich_, if that Being
who governs the world, to whom all should look for a
blessing on their honest endeavours, doth not, in his
wise providence, otherwise determine.
Scattered through the works of Franklin are various miscellaneous
productions of no slight literary value. The _Parable against Persecution_
was an ancient conception, old, we are told by Jeremy Taylor in his
_Liberty of Prophesying_, as the Jews' Books. Franklin never claimed more
credit for it, as he stated in a letter to Vaughan, "than what related to
the style, and the addition of the concluding threatening and promise."
These qualifications, however, leave him quite a different measure of
credit from that of an artist who merely touches up a portrait by another
hand, as a perusal of the parable will satisfy any reader. The incident,
upon which the story turns, is the reception by Abraham into his tent of a
stranger who fails to bless God at meat. Abraham expels him from the tent
with blows for not worshipping the most high God, Creator of Heaven and
Earth; only to be rebuked by the Almighty in these impressive words: "Have
I borne with him these hundred and ninety and eight years, and nourished
him, and cloathed him, notwithstanding his rebellion against me; and
couldst not thou, who art thyself a sinner, bear with him one night?"
Only less felicitous was Franklin's _Parable on Brotherly Love_. Simeon,
Levi and Judah are successively denied by their brother Reuben the use of
an axe which he had bought of the Ishmaelite merchants, and which he highly
prized. Therefore, they buy axes themselves from the Ishmaelites, and, as
luck will have it, while Reuben is hewing timber on the river bank, his axe
slips into the water and is lost. Reuben then applies to each of his three
brothers in turn for the use of their axes. Simeon reminds him of his
selfishness, and flatly refuses. Levi reproaches him, but adds that he will
be better than he, and will lend his axe to him. Reuben, however, is too
ashamed to accept it. Judah, seeing the grief and shame in his countenance,
anticipates the request and exclaims, "My brother, I know thy loss; but why
should it trouble thee? Lo, have I not an axe that will serve both thee
and me!" And then the lovely parable continues in these words:
And Reuben fell on his neck, and kissed him, with
tears, saying, "Thy kindness is great, but thy goodness
in forgiving me is greater. Thou art indeed my brother,
and whilst I live, will I surely love thee."
And Judah said, "Let us also love our other brethren:
behold, are we not all of one blood?" And Joseph saw
these things, and reported them to his father Jacob.
And Jacob said, "Reuben did wrong, but he repented.
Simeon also did wrong; and Levi was not altogether
blameless. But the heart of Judah is princely. Judah
hath the soul of a king. His father's children shall
bow down before him, and he shall rule over his
brethren."
The papers contributed by Franklin to the _Busy-Body_ and the _Pennsylvania
Gazette_ clearly indicate the influence of Addison and Steele. The
Ridentius and Eugenius of the second issue, Ridentius, the wight, who gave
himself an hour's diversion on the cock of a man's hat, the heels of his
shoes or on one of his unguarded expressions or personal defects, Eugenius
who preferred to make himself a public jest rather than be at the pains of
seeing his friend in confusion, pale phantoms though they be, are palpably
imitations of the Spectator and Tatler. So are the Cato of the third issue
of the _Busy-Body_, whose countenance revealed habits of virtue that made
one forget his homespun linen and seven days' beard, and the Cretico of the
same issue, the "sowre Philosopher" who commanded nothing better from his
dependents than the submissive deportment, which was like the worship paid
by the Indians to the Devil.
Unlike these characters, the Patience of the fourth issue of the
_Busy-Body_ is a real creature of flesh and blood. She writes to the
Busy-Body for advice, informing him that she is a single woman, and keeps a
shop in the town for her livelihood, and has a certain neighbor, who is
really agreeable company enough, and has for some time been an intimate of
hers, but who, of late, has tried her out of all patience by her frequent
and long visits. She cannot do a thing in the world but this friend must
know all about it, and her friend has besides two children just big enough
to run about and do petty mischief, who accompany their mother on her
visits and put things in the shop out of sorts; so that the writer has all
the trouble and pesterment of children without the pleasure--of calling
them her own.
Pray, Sir [concludes the unhappy Patience], tell me
what I shall do; and talk a little against such
unreasonable Visiting in your next Paper; tho' I would
not have her affronted with me for a great Deal, for
sincerely I love her and her Children, as well, I
think, as a Neighbour can, and she buys a great many
Things in a Year at my Shop. But I would beg her to
consider that she uses me unmercifully, Tho' I believe
it is only for want of Thought. But I have twenty
Things more to tell you besides all this: There is a
handsome Gentleman, that has a Mind (I don't question)
to make love to me, but he can't get the least
Opportunity to--O dear! here she comes again; I must
conclude, yours, &c.
This letter is made the subject of some sensible comments by the
_Busy-Body_ on the importance of remembering the words of the Wise Man,
"Withdraw thy Foot from the House of thy Neighbour, lest he grow weary of
thee, and so hate thee." Later the same caution was to be conveyed in Poor
Richard's, "Fish and Visitors smell after three days." The paper ends with
the approval by the _Busy-Body_ of the Turkish practice of admonishing
guests that it is time for them to go, without actually asking them to do
so, by having a chafing dish with the grateful incense of smoking aloes
rising from it brought into the room and applied to their beards.
Even more lifelike than Patience are Anthony Afterwit, Celia Single, Mr.
and Mrs. Careless and Alice Addertongue, the figures brought to our eye by
the _Pennsylvania Gazette_. Indeed, Addison himself would have had no
occasion to be ashamed of them, if they had been figments of his own fancy.
In his letter to the editor of the _Gazette_, Anthony Afterwit told him
that about the time that he first addressed his spouse her father let it be
known that, if she married a man of his liking, he would give two hundred
pounds with her on the day of marriage, and that he had made some fine
plans, and had even, in some measure, neglected his business on the
strength of this assurance, but that, when the old gentleman saw that the
writer was pretty well engaged, he, without assigning any reason, grew very
angry, forbade him the house and told his daughter that, if she married
him, he would not give her a farthing. However (as the father foresaw), he
stole a wedding, and took his wife to his house, where they were not in
quite so poor a condition as the couple described in the Scotch song who
had
"Neither Pot nor Pan,
But four bare Legs together,"
for he had a house tolerably furnished for an ordinary man. His wife,
however, was strongly inclined to be a gentlewoman. His old-fashioned
looking-glass was one day broke, "_No Mortal could tell which way_," she
said, and was succeeded by a large fashionable one. This in turn led to
another table more suitable to such a glass, and the new table to some very
handsome chairs. Thus, by degrees, he found all his old furniture stored up
in the garret and everything below altered for the better.
Then, on one pretext or another, came along a tea-table with all its
appurtenances of china and silver, a maid, a clock, and a pacing mare, for
which he paid twenty pounds. The result was that, receiving a very severe
dun, which mentioned the next court, he began in earnest to project relief.
His dear having gone over the river the preceding Monday to see a relation,
and stay a fortnight, because she could not bear the heat of the town, he
took his turn at alterations. He dismissed the maid, bag and baggage; he
sold the pacing mare, and bought a good milch cow with three pounds of the
money; he disposed of the tea-table, and put a spinning wheel in its place;
he stuffed nine empty tea canisters with flax, and with some of the money,
derived from the sale of the tea-furniture, he bought a set of knitting
needles; "for to tell you a truth, which I would have go no farther," added
honest Anthony, "_I begin to want stockings_." The stately clock he
transformed into an hour glass, by which he had gained a good round sum,
and one of the pieces of the old looking-glass, squared and framed,
supplied the place of the old one. In short, the face of things was quite
changed, and he had paid his debts and found money in his pocket. His good
dame was expected home next Friday, and, if she could conform with his new
scheme of living, they would be the happiest couple, perhaps, in the
Province, and, by the blessings of God, might soon be in thriving
circumstances. He had reserved the great glass for her, and he would allow
her, when she came in, to be taken suddenly ill with the _headache_, the
_stomachache_, the fainting fits, or whatever other disorder she might
think more proper, and she might retire to bed as soon as she pleased, but,
if he did not find her in perfect health, both of body and mind, the next
morning, away would go the aforesaid great glass, with several other
trinkets, to the _vendue_ that very day.
That the wife of Anthony did succumb to the situation, we know, for it was
an unfortunate reference to her that caused Celia Single to write her
letter to the editor of the _Gazette_. During the morning of the preceding
Wednesday, she said, she happened to be in at Mrs. Careless', when the
husband of that lady returned from market, and showed his wife some balls
of thread which he had bought. "My Dear," says he, "I like mightily these
Stockings, which I yesterday saw Neighbour Afterwit knitting for her
Husband, of Thread of her own Spinning. I should be glad to have some such
stockins myself: I understand that your Maid Mary is a very good Knitter,
and seeing this Thread in Market, I have bought it, that the Girl may make
a Pair or two for me." Then, according to Celia, there took place in her
presence a dialogue between husband and wife so animated that, knowing as
she did that a man and his wife are apt to quarrel more violently, when
before strangers, than when by themselves, she got up and went out hastily.
She was glad, however, to understand from Mary, who came to her of an
errand in the evening, that the couple dined together pretty peaceably (the
balls of thread, that had caused the difference, being thrown into the
kitchen fire).
The story, beginning with the reply of Mrs. Careless to the offensive
suggestion of Mr. Careless, is too good not to be reproduced in full.
Mrs. Careless was just then at the Glass, dressing her
Head, and turning about with the Pins in her Mouth,
"Lord, Child," says she, "are you crazy? What Time has
Mary to knit? Who must do the Work, I wonder, if you
set her to Knitting?" "Perhaps, my Dear," says he, "you
have a mind to knit 'em yourself; I remember, when I
courted you, I once heard you say, that you had learn'd
to knit of your Mother." "I knit Stockins for you!"
says she; "not I truly! There are poor Women enough in
Town, that can knit; if you please, you may employ
them." "Well, but my Dear," says he, "you know _a penny
sav'd is a penny got_, A pin a day is a groat a year,
every little makes a muckle, and there is neither Sin
nor Shame in Knitting a pair of Stockins; why should
you express such a mighty Aversion to it? As to _poor_
Women, you know we are not People of Quality, we have
no Income to maintain us but what arises from my
Labour and Industry: Methinks you should not be at all
displeas'd, if you have an Opportunity to get something
as well as myself."
"I wonder," says she, "how you can propose such a thing
to me; did not you always tell me you would maintain me
like a Gentlewoman? If I had married Captain ----, he
would have scorn'd even to mention Knitting of
Stockins." "Prithee," says he, (a little nettled,)
"what do you tell me of your Captains? If you could
have had him, I suppose you would, or perhaps you did
not very well like him. If I did promise to maintain
you like a Gentlewoman, I suppose 'tis time enough for
that, when you know how to behave like one; Meanwhile
'tis your Duty to help make me able. How long, d'ye
think, I can maintain you at your present Rate of
Living?" "Pray," says she, (somewhat fiercely, and
dashing the Puff into the Powder-box,) "don't use me
after this Manner, for I assure you I won't bear it.
This is the Fruit of your poison Newspapers; there
shall come no more here, I promise you." "Bless us,"
says he, "what an unaccountable thing is this? Must a
Tradesman's Daughter, and the Wife of a Tradesman,
necessarily and instantly be a Gentlewoman? You had no
Portion; I am forc'd to work for a Living; you are too
great to do the like; there's the Door, go and live
upon your Estate, if you can find it; in short, I don't
desire to be troubled w'ye."
And then it was that Celia Single gathered up her skirts and left.
The letter from Alice Addertongue to the editor of the _Gazette_ is exactly
in the manner of the _School for Scandal_, written many years later. She is
a young girl of about thirty-five, she says, and lives at present with her
mother. Like the Emperor, who, if a day passed over his head, during which
he had conferred no benefit on any man, was in the habit of saying, _Diem
perdidi_, _I have lost a Day_, she would make use of the same expression,
were it possible for a day to pass over her head, during which she had
failed to scandalize someone; a misfortune, thanks be praised, that had not
befallen her these dozen years.
My mother, good Woman, and I [the forked tongue plays
precisely as it might have done in the mouth of Lady
Sneerwell] have heretofore differ'd upon this Account.
She argu'd, that Scandal spoilt all good Conversation;
and I insisted, that without it there would be no such
Thing. Our Disputes once rose so high, that we parted
Tea-Tables, and I concluded to entertain my
Acquaintance in the Kitchin. The first Day of this
Separation we both drank Tea at the same Time, but she
with her Visitors in the Parlor. She would not hear of
the least Objection to anyone's Character, but began a
new sort of Discourse in some queer philosophical
Manner as this; "I am mightily pleas'd sometimes," says
she, "when I observe and consider, that the World is
not so bad as People out of humour imagine it to be.
There is something amiable, some good Quality or other,
in everybody. If we were only to speak of People that
are least respected, there is such a one is very
dutiful to her Father, and methinks has a fine Set of
Teeth; such a one is very respectful to her Husband;
such a one is very kind to her poor Neighbours, and
besides has a very handsome Shape; such a one is always
ready to serve a Friend, and in my opinion there is not
a Woman in Town that has a more agreable Air and Gait."
This fine kind of Talk, which lasted near half an Hour,
she concluded by saying, "I do not doubt but everyone
of you have made the like Observations, and I should be
glad to have the Conversation continu'd upon this
Subject." Just at that Juncture I peep'd in at the
Door, and never in my Life before saw such a Set of
simple vacant Countenances. They looked somehow neither
glad, nor sorry, nor angry, nor pleas'd, nor
indifferent, nor attentive; but (excuse the Simile)
like so many blue wooden images of Rie Doe. I in the
Kitchin had already begun a ridiculous Story of Mr.
----'s Intrigue with his Maid, and his Wife's Behaviour
upon the Discovery; at some Passages we laugh'd
heartily, and one of the gravest of Mama's Company,
without making any Answer to her Discourse, got up _to
go and see what the Girls were so merry about_: She was
follow'd by a Second, and shortly by a Third, till at
last the old Gentlewoman found herself quite alone,
and, being convinc'd that her Project was
impracticable, came herself and finish'd her Tea with
us; ever since which _Saul also has been among the
Prophets_, and our Disputes lie dormant.
It was in the _Pennsylvania Gazette_, too, that Franklin published his
"Dialogue between Philocles and Horatio," in which Philocles twice meets
Horatio in the fields, and, in accents full of persuasive blandishment,
diverts his feet from the pursuit of sensual pleasure into paths of
contentment and peace. In the first dialogue, the moralist takes as his
thesis the proposition that self-denial is not only the most reasonable but
the most pleasant thing in the world. In the second, he holds up to Horatio
the constant and durable happiness, so unlike the chequered, fleeting
pleasures of Sense, which springs from acts of humanity, friendship,
generosity and benevolence. One maxim in the last dialogue is worth many of
the sayings of Poor Richard: "The Foundation of all Virtue and Happiness is
Thinking rightly."
Other papers from the hand of Franklin that appeared in the _Gazette_ were
_A Witch Trial at Mount Holly_, _An Apology for Printers_, _A Meditation on
a Quart Mugg_, _Shavers and Trimmers_, and _Exporting of Felons to the
Colonies_.
In the "Witch Trial at Mount Holly," Franklin describes in a highly
humorous manner the results of the ordeals to which a man and a woman,
accused by a man and a woman of witchcraft, were subjected. One of these
ordeals consisted in weighing the accused in scales against a Bible for the
purpose of seeing whether it would prove too heavy for them.
Then [the facetious narrative relates] came out of the
House a grave, tall Man carrying the Holy Writ before
the supposed Wizard etc., (as solemely as the
Sword-Bearer of London before the Lord Mayor) the
Wizard was first put in the Scale, and over him was
read a Chapter out of the Books of Moses, and then the
Bible was put in the other Scale, (which, being kept
down before) was immediately let go; but, to the great
surprize of the Spectators, Flesh and Bones came down
plump, and outweighed that great good Book by
abundance. After the same Manner the others were
served, and their Lumps of Mortality severally were too
heavy for Moses and all the Prophets and Apostles.
This ordeal was followed by the Trial by Water. Both accused and accusers
were stripped, except that the women were not deprived of their shifts,
bound hand and foot and let down into the water by ropes from the side of a
barge. The rest is thus told:
The accused man being thin and spare with some
Difficulty began to sink at last; but the rest, every
one of them, swam very light upon the Water. A Sailor
in the Flat jump'd out upon the Back of the Man accused
thinking to drive him down to the Bottom; but the
Person bound, without any Help, came up some time
before the other. The Woman Accuser being told that she
did not sink, would be duck'd a second Time; when she
swam again as light as before. Upon which she declared,
That she believed the Accused had bewitched her to make
her so light, and that she would be duck'd again a
Hundred Times but she would duck the Devil out of her.
The Accused Man, being surpriz'd at his own swimming,
was not so confident of his Innocence as before, but
said, "If I am a Witch, it is more than I know." The
more thinking Part of the Spectators were of Opinion
that any Person so bound and placed in the Water
(unless they were mere Skin and Bones) would swim, till
their breath was gone, and their Lungs fill'd with
Water. But it being the general Belief of the Populace
that the Women's Shifts and the Garters with which they
were bound help'd to support them, it is said they are
to be tried again the next Warm Weather, naked.
In the "Apology for Printers," Franklin defends his guild with much point
and good sense, in terms modern enough to be fully applicable to
newspapers at the present time. It was inspired by the resentment which his
advertisement relating to Sea Hens and Black Gowns excited, and, though
written in a half-humorous style, states the difficulties of an editor,
between his duty to publish everything, and the certainty of private
resentment, if he does, with about as much felicity of presentation as they
are ever likely to be stated. Among the various solid reasons, set forth in
formal numerical sequence, that he gave, by way of mitigation, for
publishing the advertisement, he mentioned these, too:
"6. That I got Five Shillings by it.
"7. That none who are angry with me would have given me so much to let it
alone."
In answer to the accusation that printers sometimes printed vicious or
silly things not worth reading, he charged the fact up to the vicious taste
of the public itself. He had known, he said, a very numerous impression of
Robin Hood's songs to go off in the Province at 2 s. per book in less than
a twelvemonth, when a small quantity of David's Psalms (an excellent
version) had lain upon his hands about twice that long.
* * * * *
In the "Meditation on a Quart Mugg" Franklin begins with the exclamation,
"WRETCHED, miserable, and unhappy Mug!" and traces with mock sympathy all
the misfortunes of its ignoble and squalid career from the time that it is
first forced into the company of boisterous sots, who lay all their
nonsense, noise, profane swearing, cursing and quarrelling on it, though it
speaks not a word, until the inevitable hour when it is broken into pieces,
and finds its way for the most part back to Mother Earth. The paper is only
a trifle, but a trifle fashioned with no little skill to hit the fancy of
an age that, as Franklin's "Drunkard's Vocabulary" (also published in the
_Gazette_) shows, had innumerable cant terms for the condition for which
the mug was held to such an unjust responsibility.
The paper on "Shavers and Trimmers" is not so happy and well sustained, but
its classifications of the different species of persons, answering these
descriptions, is not without humor. One sentence in it, when Franklin
speaks of the species of Shavers and Trimmers, who "cover (what is called
by an eminent Preacher) _their poor Dust_ in tinsel Cloaths and gaudy
Plumes of Feathers," reads like a paragraph in the _Courant_. "A competent
Share of religious Horror thrown into the Countenance," he says, "with
proper Distortions of the Face, and the Addition of a lank Head of Hair, or
a long Wig and Band, commands a most profound Respect to Insolence and
Ignorance."
The paper on the "Exporting of Felons to the Colonies" is marked by the
grim, biting irony of Swift, but was no severer than the practice of
setting British criminals at large in America deserved. Such tender
parental concern, Franklin said, called aloud for due returns of gratitude
and duty, and he suggested that these returns should assume the form of
rattlesnakes, "Felons-convict from the Beginning of the World." In the
spring of the year, when they first crept out of their holes, they were
feeble, heavy, slow and easily taken, and, if a small bounty was allowed
per head, some thousands might be collected annually, and transported to
Britain. There he proposed that they should be carefully distributed in St.
James' Park, in the Spring Gardens, and other pleasure resorts about
London, and in the gardens of all the nobility and gentry throughout the
nation, but particularly in the gardens of the Prime Ministers, the Lords
of Trade and Members of Parliament; for to them they were most particularly
obliged. Such a paper, it is needless to say, was better calculated for its
purpose than a thousand appeals of the ordinary type would have been.
The speech of Polly Baker is one of the most famous of Franklin's _jeux
d'esprit_. The introduction to it states that it was delivered when she
was prosecuted for the fifth time for having a bastard child, and with such
effect that the court decided not to punish her; indeed with such effect
that one of her judges even married her the next day, and in time had
fifteen children by her. The perfectly ingenuous manner in which the
traverser refuses to admit that she has committed any offence whatever and
insists that, in default of honorable suitors, she has but dutifully,
though irregularly, complied with the first and great command of nature and
nature's God--increase and multiply--is undoubtedly, coarse as it is, a
stroke of art, but the performance is too gross for modern scruples.
More decorous reading is the fictitious discourse by a Spanish Jesuit on
the "Meanes of disposing the Enemie to Peace," which Franklin, during his
first mission to England, contributed to the _London Chronicle_ for the
purpose of rousing the English people to a sense of the artifices, that
were being employed by the French to build up a party in England for peace
at any price. In the introduction to the discourse, it is stated that it
was taken from a book containing a number of discourses, addressed by the
Jesuit to the King of Spain in 1629, and that nothing was needed to render
it _apropos_ to the existing situation of England except the substitution
of France for Spain. The discourse points out in detail, with shrewd
insight into all the selfish and timid impulses, by which a society is
corrupted or enervated, when cunningly practised upon, the different
classes in the country of the enemy that could be manipulated in one way or
another until no sound but that of Peace, Peace, Peace would be heard from
any quarter.
_The Craven Street Gazette_, written in mock court language, and replete
with the subtle suggestions of household intimacy, is one of the most
exquisite triumphs of Franklin's wit and fancy.
This morning [it begins], Queen Margaret, accompanied
by her first maid of honour, Miss Franklin, (Sally
Franklin) set out for Rochester. Immediately on their
departure, the whole street was in tears--from a heavy
shower of rain. It is whispered, that the new family
administration which took place on her Majesty's
departure, promises, like all other new
administrations, to govern much better than the old
one.
We hear, that the great person (so called from his
enormous size), of a certain family in a certain
street, is grievously affected at the late changes, and
could hardly be comforted this morning, though the new
ministry promised him a roasted shoulder of mutton and
potatoes for his dinner.
It is said, that the same great person intended to pay
his respects to another great personage this day, at
St. James's, it being coronation-day; hoping thereby a
little to amuse his grief; but was prevented by an
accident, Queen Margaret, or her maid of honour having
carried off the key of the drawers, so that the lady of
the bed-chamber could not come at a laced shirt for his
Highness. Great clamours were made on this occasion
against her Majesty.
And so the _Gazette_ goes on, gay and graceful as the play of sunshine on
the surface of a dimpled sea, from incident to incident that took place
during the absence of Queen Margaret (Mrs. Stevenson) and Miss Franklin,
investing each with a ceremonious dignity and importance that never descend
to buffoonery.
These are some of the occurrences chronicled as taking place on the first
Sunday after the departure of the Queen. Walking up and down in his room we
might observe was one of Franklin's ways of taking exercise.
Lord and Lady Hewson walked after dinner to Kensington,
to pay their duty to the Dowager, and Dr. Fatsides made
four hundred and sixty-nine turns in his dining-room,
as the exact distance of a visit to the lovely Lady
Barwell, whom he did not find at home; so there was no
struggle for and against a kiss, and he sat down to
dream in the easy-chair that he had it without any
trouble.
And these are some of the observations made under the date of the
succeeding Tuesday.
It is remark'd, that the Skies have wept every Day in
Craven Street, the Absence of the Queen.
The Publick may be assured that this Morning a certain
_great_ Personage was asked very complaisantly by the
Mistress of the Household, if he would chuse to have
the Blade-Bone of Saturday's Mutton that had been kept
for his Dinner to-day _broil'd_ or _cold_. _He answer'd
gravely, If there is any Flesh on it, it may be
broil'd; if not, it may as well be cold._ Orders were
accordingly given for Broiling it. But when it came to
Table, there was indeed so very little Flesh, or rather
none, (Puss having din'd on it yesterday after
Nanny)[57] that if our new Administration had been as
good Oeconomists as they would be thought, the Expence
of Broiling might well have been saved to the Publick,
and carried to the Sinking Fund. It is assured the
_great_ Person bears all with infinite Patience. But
the Nation is astonish'd at the insolent Presumption,
that dares treat so much Mildness in so cruel a manner!
Under the same date is made the announcement that at six o'clock, that
afternoon, news had come by the post that her Majesty arrived safely at
Rochester on Saturday night. "The Bells," the _Gazette_ adds, "immediately
rang--for Candles to illuminate the Parlour, the Court went into Cribbidge,
and the Evening concluded with every other Demonstration of Joy." This is
followed by a letter to the _Gazette_ from a person signing himself
"Indignation," who says that he makes no doubt of the truth of the
statement that a certain great person is half-starved on the blade-bone of
a sheep by a set of the most careless, worthless, thoughtless,
inconsiderate, corrupt, ignorant, blundering, foolish, crafty & knavish
ministers that ever got into a house and pretended to govern a family and
provide a dinner. "Alas for the poor old England of Craven Street!" this
correspondent exclaims, "If they continue in Power another Week, the Nation
will be ruined. Undone, totally undone, if I and my Friends are not
appointed to succeed them."
This letter is accompanied by another signed, "A Hater of Scandal," which
takes "Indignation" to task, and declares that the writer believes that,
even if the Angel Gabriel would condescend to be their minister, and
provide their dinners, he would scarcely escape newspaper defamation from a
gang of hungry, ever-restless, discontented and malicious scribblers. It
was a piece of justice, he declared, that the publisher of the _Gazette_
owed to their righteous administration to undeceive the public on this
occasion by assuring them of the fact, which is that there was provided and
actually smoking on the table under his royal nose at the same instant as
the blade-bone as fine a piece of ribs of beef roasted as ever knife was
put into, with potatoes, horse-radish, pickled walnuts &c. which his
Highness might have eaten, if so he had pleased to do.
Along with the political intelligence and the letters the _Gazette_ also
contains these notices and stock quotations:
MARRIAGES, none since our last--but Puss begins to go a
Courting.
DEATHS, In the back Closet and elsewhere, many poor
Mice.
STOCKS Biscuit--very low. Buckwheat & Indian Meal--both
sour. Tea, lowering daily--in the Canister. Wine, shut.
The _Petition of the Letter Z_ was a humorous offshoot of Franklin's
Reformed Alphabet. In a formal complaint after the manner of a bill in
chancery, to the worshipful Isaac Bickerstaff, Esquire, Censor-General, Z
complains that his claims to respect are as good as those of the other
letters of the Alphabet, but that he had not only been placed at its tail,
when he had as much right as any of his companions to be at its head, but
by the injustice of his enemies had been totally excluded from the word
WISE and his place filled by a little hissing, crooked, serpentine,
venomous letter, called S, though it must be evident to his worship and to
all the world that W, I, S, E does not spell _Wize_ but _Wise_. The
petition ends with the prayer that, in consideration of his long-suffering
and patience, the petitioner may be placed at the head of the Alphabet, and
that S may be turned out of the word _wise_, and the Petitioner employed
instead of him.
Z did not make out his case, for at the foot of the petition is appended
this order: "Mr. Bickerstaff, having examined the allegations of the above
petition, judges and determines, that Z be admonished to be content with
his station, forbear reflections upon his brother letters, and remember his
own small usefulness, and the little occasion there is for him in the
Republic of Letters, since S whom he so despises can so well serve instead
of him."
Some of the liveliest of the lighter papers of Franklin were written during
the course of his French Mission. His inimitable _Journey to the Elysian
Fields_ and _Conte_ have already received our attention in an earlier
chapter. Among the others was _The Sale of the Hessians_, _The Supplement
to the Boston Independent Chronicle_, _The Ephemera_, _The Whistle_, his
letter to the Abbe de la Roche, communicating to him the _petite chanson a
boire_ that he had written forty years before, his letter to the Abbe
Morellet on wine, the _Dialogue between him and the Gout_, _The Handsome
and Deformed Leg_ and _The Economical Project_. If there was nothing else
to support the claim of Franklin to the authorship of _The Sale of the
Hessians_, the difficulty of abridging it would be one proof. Its humor is
as trenchant as that of Frederick the Great in levying the same toll upon
these hirelings, when passing through his dominions on their way to
America, pursuant to the mercenary engagements between their German masters
and George III., as that levied by him upon other cattle. The paper is
thrown into the form of a letter from the Count De Schaumbergh to the Baron
Hohendorf, commanding the Hessian troops in America. It begins as follows:
MONSIEUR DE BARON:--On my return from Naples, I
received at Rome your letter of the 27th December of
last year. I have learned with unspeakable pleasure the
courage our troops exhibited at Trenton, and you cannot
imagine my joy on being told that of the 1,950 Hessians
engaged in the fight, but 345 escaped. There were just
1,605 men killed, and I can not sufficiently commend
your prudence in sending an exact list of the dead to
my minister in London. This precaution was the more
necessary, as the report sent to the English Ministry
does not give but 1,455 dead. This would make 483,450
florins instead of 643,500 which I am entitled to
demand under our convention. You will comprehend the
prejudice which such an error would work in my
finances, and I do not doubt you will take the
necessary pains to prove that Lord North's list is
false and yours correct.
This is another paragraph:
I am about to send to you some new recruits. Don't
economize them. Remember glory before all things. Glory
is true wealth. There is nothing degrades the soldier
like the love of money. He must care only for honour
and reputation, but this reputation must be acquired in
the midst of dangers. A battle gained without costing
the conqueror any blood is an inglorious success, while
the conquered cover themselves with glory by perishing
with their arms in their hands. Do you remember that of
the 300 Lacedaemonians who defended the defile of
Thermopylae, not one returned? How happy should I be
could I say the same of my brave Hessians!
It is true that their King, Leonidas, perished with
them: but things have changed, and it is no longer the
custom for princes of the empire to go and fight in
America for a cause with which they have no concern.
The Baron is further commended for sending back to Europe that Dr. Crumerus
who was so successful in curing dysentery, and is told that it is better
that the Hessians should burst in their barracks than fly in a battle, and
tarnish the glory of the Count's arms.
Besides [the Count continues], you know that they pay
me as killed for all who die from disease, and I don't
get a farthing for runaways. My trip to Italy, which
has cost me enormously, makes it desirable that there
should be a great mortality among them. You will
therefore promise promotion to all who expose
themselves; you will exhort them to seek glory in the
midst of dangers; you will say to Major Maundorff that
I am not at all content with his saving the 345 men who
escaped the massacre of Trenton. Through the whole
campaign he has not had ten men killed in consequence
of his orders. Finally, let it be your principal object
to prolong the war and avoid a decisive engagement on
either side, for I have made arrangements for a grand
Italian opera, and I do not wish to be obliged to give
it up. Meantime I pray God, my dear Baron de Hohendorf,
to have you in his holy and gracious keeping.
The _Supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle_ is distinguished by
the same sort of cool, dry mocking verisimilitude. Captain Gerrish, of the
New England Militia, is supposed to write a letter in which he says that
the members of a recent expedition against the Indians were struck with
horror to find among the packages of peltry captured by them eight large
ones containing scalps of their unhappy country-folks taken in the last
three years by the Seneca Indians from the heads of inhabitants of the
frontiers of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Virginia, and sent by
them as a present to Colonel Haldimand, the Governor of Canada; to be
forwarded by him to England. The scalps, Captain Gerrish asserts, were
accompanied by a curious letter to the Governor from one, James Craufurd.
Then is set forth this letter which describes with the minuteness of a
mercantile invoice the contents of each of the eight packages of scalps,
some of Congress soldiers, some of farmers surprised in their houses at
night, some of farmers killed in their houses by day, some of farmers
killed in the fields, some of women, some of boys, some of girls and some
of little infants ripped from the womb. The contents of several of the
packages are described as mixed lots. The letter also fully explains the
Indian triumphal marks painted upon the different scalps, which were all
cured, dried and stretched like the pelts of the otter or beaver on hoops.
The black circle denoted that the victim had perished at night, the little
red foot that he had died in defence of his life and family, the little
yellow flame that he had been tortured at the stake. The hair braided in
the Indian fashion meant that the victim was a mother, other tokens that
the victim was a boy or a girl. A band fixed to the hoop of one of the
scalps signified that the head to which it had been attached was that of a
rebel clergyman. Many gruesome tokens are explained in the same systematic
and businesslike manner. Along with several other passages from a speech of
Conejogatchie in Council, the letter also communicates one in which the
speaker declares that his people wished the scalps to be sent across the
water to the great King that he might regard them and be refreshed. In
concluding his own letter, Captain Gerrish states that Lieutenant
Fitzgerald would have undertaken to convey the scalps to England and to
hang them all up some dark night on the trees in St. James' Park, where
they could be seen from the King and Queen's Palaces in the morning. But
this proposal, the _Chronicle_ says, was not approved in Boston. It was
proposed instead to make the scalps up in decent little packets, and to
seal and direct them; one to the King containing a sample of every kind
for his museum, one to the Queen, with some of women and children; the rest
to be distributed among both Houses of Parliament, and a double quantity to
be given to the Bishops. The relations of the _Chronicle_ to this
production were, of course, as purely fictitious as every other part of it.
Associated with the performance, as another publication in the _Chronicle_,
is a fictitious letter, too, from Paul Jones to Sir Joseph Yorke, the
English Ambassador to Holland, in which he defends himself with
considerable spirit from the charge of being a pirate, and reminds Sir
Joseph of the freebooting principles upon which England was waging war
against America. When he read this letter, Horace Walpole wrote to the
Countess of Ossory, "Have you seen in the papers an excellent letter of
Paul Jones to Sir Joseph Yorke? Elle nous dit bien des verites! I doubt
poor Sir Joseph cannot answer them! Dr. Franklin himself, I should think,
was the author. It is certainly written by a first-rate pen, and not by a
common man of war."
_The Ephemera_ was addressed to Madame Brillon, and is one of the most
justly famous of all Franklin's writings. In a letter to William
Carmichael, he states that the thought was partly taken from a little piece
of some unknown writer, which he had met with fifty years before in a
newspaper. Another proof, we might say in passing, how little disposed
Franklin was to borrow from Richard Jackson, or any one else without due
acknowledgment.
So dependent is every part of this paper for its effect upon the whole that
to quote only a portion of it would be as futile as an effort to divide a
bubble without destroying it. These are the precise words in full of this
bewitching little production:
You may remember, my dear friend, that when we lately
spent that happy day in the delightful garden and sweet
society of the Moulin Joly, I stopt a little in one of
our walks, and staid some time behind the company. We
had been shown numberless skeletons of a kind of little
fly, called an ephemera, whose successive generations,
we were told, were bred and expired within the day. I
happened to see a living company of them on a leaf, who
appeared to be engaged in conversation. You know I
understand all the inferior animal tongues; my too
great application to the study of them is the best
excuse I can give for the little progress I have made
in your charming language. I listened through curiosity
to the discourse of these little creatures; but as
they, in their national vivacity, spoke three or four
together, I could make but little of their
conversation. I found, however, by some broken
expressions that I heard now and then, they were
disputing warmly on the merit of two foreign musicians,
one a _cousin_, the other a _moscheto_; in which
dispute they spent their time, seemingly as regardless
of the shortness of life as if they had been sure of
living a month. Happy people! thought I, you are
certainly under a wise, just, and mild government,
since you have no public grievances to complain of, nor
any subject of contention but the perfections and
imperfections of foreign music. I turned my head from
them to an old grey-headed one, who was single on
another leaf, and talking to himself. Being amused with
his soliloquy, I put it down in writing, in hopes it
will likewise amuse her to whom I am so much indebted
for the most pleasing of all amusements, her delicious
company and heavenly harmony.
It was [said he] the opinion of learned philosophers of
our race, who lived and flourished long before my time,
that this vast world, the Moulin Joly, could not itself
subsist more than eighteen hours; and I think there was
some foundation for that opinion, since, by the
apparent motion of the great luminary that gives life
to all nature, and which in my time has evidently
declined considerably towards the ocean at the end of
our earth, it must then finish its course, be
extinguished in the waters that surround us, and leave
the world in cold and darkness, necessarily producing
universal death and destruction. I have lived seven of
those hours, a great age, being no less than four
hundred and twenty minutes of time. How very few of us
continue so long! I have seen generations born,
flourish, and expire. My present friends are the
children and grandchildren of the friends of my youth,
who _are now_, alas, no more! And I must soon follow
them; for, by the course of nature, though still in
health, I cannot expect to live above seven or eight
minutes longer. What now avails all my toil and labor,
in amassing honey-dew on this leaf, which I cannot live
to enjoy! What the political struggles I have been
engaged in, for the good of my compatriot inhabitants
of this bush, or my philosophical studies for the
benefit of our race in general! for, in politics, what
can laws do without morals? Our present race of
ephemerae will in a course of minutes become corrupt,
like those of other and older bushes, and consequently
as wretched. And in philosophy how small our progress!
Alas! art is long, and life is short! My friends would
comfort me with the idea of a name, they say, I shall
leave behind me; and they tell me I have lived long
enough to nature and to glory. But what will fame be to
an ephemera who no longer exists? And what will become
of all history in the eighteenth hour, when the world
itself, even the whole Moulin Joly, shall come to its
end, and be buried in universal ruin?
To me, after all my eager pursuits, no solid pleasures
now remain, but the reflection of a long life spent in
meaning well, the sensible conversation of a few good
lady ephemerae, and now and then a kind smile and a tune
from the ever amiable _Brillante_.
_The Whistle_, too, was addressed to Madame Brillon and is also one of the
most celebrated of Franklin's bagatelles, but is scarcely equal, we think,
to the best of them.
In his opinion, Franklin said, they might all draw more good from the world
than they did if they would take care not to give too much for whistles.
With this foreword, he tells his story. When a child of seven years of age,
his friends on a holiday filled his pocket with coppers, and, being charmed
with the sound of a whistle that he met by the way in the hands of another
boy, he voluntarily offered, and gave all his money for one. He then came
home, and went whistling all over the house, much pleased with his whistle,
but disturbing the entire family. But his brothers and sisters told him
that he had given four times as much for the whistle as it was worth, put
him in mind of what good things he might have bought with the rest of the
money and laughed at him so much for his folly that he cried with vexation.
The lesson, however, was of use to him, so that often, when he was tempted
to buy some unnecessary thing, he said to himself, "_Don't give too much
for the whistle_," and he saved his money. And so, when he grew up, came
into the world and observed the actions of men, he thought he met with
many, very many who gave too much for the whistle.
He then mentions who some of these men were, the man ambitious of court
favor, the man covetous of political popularity, the miser, the slave of
pleasure, the devotee of fashion, the beautiful, sweet-tempered girl,
married to an ill-natured brute of a husband, and, after the mention of
each, comes the running comment, "This man gives too much for his whistle,"
or its equivalent.
Yet [Franklin concludes], I ought to have charity for
these unhappy people, when I consider, that, with all
this wisdom of which I am boasting, there are certain
things in the world so tempting, for example, the
apples of King John, which happily are not to be
bought; for if they were put to sale by auction, I
might very easily be led to ruin myself in the
purchase, and find that I had once more given too much
for the _whistle_.
The reader has already had occasion to know what kind of fruit these apples
of King John were, and in whose orchard they grew.
To realize what an indifferent poet Franklin was, and yet at the same time
what a master of prose, one has but to first read his _petite chanson a
boire_ beginning,
"Fair Venus calls; her voice obey,"
and then his letter to the Abbe Morellet on wine. The letter was written to
repay the Abbe for some of his excellent drinking songs.
"In vino veritas," said the sage, [is the way Franklin
begins]. Before Noah, when men had nothing but water to
drink, they could not find the truth, so they went
astray, and became abominably wicked, and were justly
exterminated by the water that they were fond of
drinking. Good man Noah, seeing that this bad drink had
been the death of all his contemporaries, contracted an
aversion to it, and God to quench his thirst, created
the vine, and revealed to him the art of making wine.
With its aid, Noah discovered many and many a truth,
and, since his time, the word "divine" has been in use,
meaning originally to discover by means of wine....
Since that time, too, all excellent things, even
deities themselves, have been called divine or
divinities.
Men speak of the conversion of water into wine at the
marriage of Cana as a miracle. But this change is
worked every day by the goodness of God under our eyes.
Witness the water, that falls from the skies upon our
vineyards, and then passes into the roots of the vines
to be converted into wine, a constant proof that God
loves us, and that he is pleased to see us happy. The
miracle in question was performed merely to hasten the
operation on an occasion of sudden need that made it
indispensable.
It is true that God has also taught men how to reduce
wine to water; but what kind of water? Why
_l'eau-de-vie_.
Franklin then begs his Christian brother to be kindly and beneficent like
God and not to spoil his good work. When he saw his table companion pour
wine into his glass he should not hasten to pour water into it. Why should
he desire to drown the truth? His neighbor was likely to know better what
suited him than he. Perhaps he does not like water, perhaps he wishes only
a few drops of it out of complaisance to the fashion of the day, perhaps
he does not wish another to see how little he puts in his glass. Water
then should be offered only to children; it was a false and annoying form
of politeness to do otherwise. This the writer told the Abbe as a man of
the world, and he would end as he had begun, like a good Christian, by
making one very important religious observation suggested by the Holy
Scriptures. While the Apostle Paul had gravely advised Timothy to put wine
into his water for his health, not one of the Apostles, nor any of the Holy
Fathers, had ever advised anyone to put water into wine.
The "Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout" owes its value not so much to
its humor as to the knowledge that it incidentally affords us of the
personal habits of the former and his intimacy with Madame Helvetius and
Madame Brillon. Along with the reproaches and twinges of pain which evoke
repeated Ehs! and Ohs! from Franklin, as the colloquy proceeds, the Gout
contrives to communicate to us no little information on these subjects in
terms in which physiology, hygiene and gallantry are each made to do duty.
He tells Franklin that he, the Gout, very well knows that the quantity of
meat and drink proper for a man, who takes a reasonable degree of exercise,
is too much for another who never takes any. If his, Franklin's, situation
in life is a sedentary one, his amusements and recreations at least should
be active. He ought to walk or ride, or, if the weather prevents that, play
at billiards. But, instead of gaining an appetite for breakfast by salutary
exercise, he amuses himself with books, pamphlets or newspapers, which
commonly are not worth the reading. Yet he eats an inordinate breakfast,
four dishes of tea, with cream, and one or two buttered toasts, with slices
of hung beef, which the Gout fancies are not things the most easily
digested. Immediately afterwards he sits down to write at his desk or
converse with persons who apply to him on business. Thus the time passes
till one without any kind of bodily exercise. This might be pardoned out
of regard, as Franklin said, for his sedentary condition, but what is his
practice after dinner? Walking in the beautiful gardens of those friends
with whom he had dined would be the choice of men of sense. His was to be
fixed down to chess, where he was found engaged for two or three hours!
This was his perpetual recreation, which was the least eligible of any for
a sedentary man, because, instead of accelerating the motion of the fluids,
the rigid attention it required helped to retard the circulation and
obstruct internal secretions. Wrapped in the speculations of this wretched
game, he destroyed his constitution. What could be expected from such a
course of living but a body replete with stagnant humours, ready to fall a
prey to all kinds of dangerous maladies, if he, the Gout, did not
occasionally bring him relief by agitating those humors, and so purifying
or dissipating them. If it was in some nook or alley in Paris deprived of
walks that Franklin played awhile at chess after dinner, this might be
excusable, but the same taste prevailed with him in Paris, at Auteuil
Montmartre or Sanois, places where there were the finest, gardens and
walks, a pure air, beautiful women and most agreeable and instructive
conversation; all of which he might enjoy by frequenting the walks. At this
point, Franklin, after some more prolonged Ehs! and Ohs!, manages to remind
the Gout that it is not fair to say that he takes no exercise when he does
so very often in going out to dine and returning in his carriage; but this
statement the Gout brushes brusquely aside. That of all imaginable
exercises, he asserts, is the most slight and insignificant, if Franklin
alludes to the motion of a carriage suspended on springs. By observing the
degree of heat obtained by different kinds of motion, we may form an
estimate of the quantity of exercise given by each. Thus, for example, if
Franklin should turn out to walk in winter with cold feet, in an hour's
time he would be in a glow all over; if he should ride on horseback, the
same effect would scarcely be perceived by four hours' round trotting,
but, if he should loll in a carriage, such as he had mentioned, he might
travel all day, and gladly enter the last inn to warm his feet by a
fire.[58] Providence has appointed few to roll in carriages, while it has
given to all a pair of legs, which are machines infinitely more commodious
and serviceable. He should observe, when he walked, that all his weight was
alternately thrown from one leg to the other; this occasions a great
pressure upon the vessels of the foot, and repels their contents. When
relieved by the weight being thrown on the other foot, the vessels of the
first are allowed to replenish, and, by a return of this weight, this
repulsion again succeeds; thus accelerating the circulation of the blood,
with the result that the cheeks are ruddy and the health established.
Behold [the Gout is then artfully made to say], your
fair friend at Auteuil (Madame Helvetius); a lady who
received from bounteous nature more really useful
science, than half a dozen such pretenders to
philosophy as you have been able to extract from all
your books. When she honours you with a visit, it is on
foot. She walks all hours of the day, and leaves
indolence, and its concomitant maladies, to be endured
by her horses. In this see at once the preservative of
her health and personal charms.
Nor does the Gout go off before he is with equal art made to say a
flattering word about the Brillons.