By the way [he asked], when do you intend to live?--_i.

e._, to enjoy life. When will you retire to your villa,

give yourself repose, delight in viewing the operations

of nature in the vegetable creation, assist her in her

works, get your ingenious friends at times about you,

make them happy with your conversation, and enjoy

theirs: or, if alone, amuse yourself with your books

and elegant collections?

To be hurried about perpetually from one sick chamber

to another is not living. Do you please yourself with

the fancy that you are doing good? You are mistaken.

Half the lives you save are not worth saving, as being

useless, and almost all the other half ought not to be

saved, as being mischievous. Does your conscience never

hint to you the impiety of being in constant warfare

against the plans of Providence? Disease was intended

as the punishment of intemperance, sloth, and other

vices, and the example of that punishment was intended

to promote and strengthen the opposite virtues.

All of which, of course, except the suggestion about retirement, which was

quite in keeping with Franklin's conception of a rational life, was nothing

more than humorous paradox on the part of a man who loved all his

fellow-creatures too much to despair of any of them.

When Franklin himself was seized with a grave attack of illness shortly

after his arrival in England on his first mission, Doctor Fothergill was

his physician, and seems to have cupped and physicked him with drastic

assiduity. The patient was not a very docile one, for he wrote to Deborah

that, too soon thinking himself well, he ventured out twice, and both times

got fresh cold, and fell down again; and that his "good doctor" grew very

angry with him for acting contrary to his cautions and directions, and

obliged him to promise more observance for the future. Always to Franklin

the Doctor remained the "good Doctor Fothergill." Even in a codicil to his

will, in bequeathing to one of his friends the silver cream pot given to

him by the doctor, with the motto "Keep bright the chain," he refers to him

by that designation.

Nor were his obligations as a patient the only obligations that Franklin

owed to this friend. When his early letters on electricity were sent over

to England, only to be laughed at in the first instance, they happened to

pass under the eye of the Doctor. He saw their merit, advised their

publication, and wrote the preface to the pamphlet in which they were

published by Cave. But the things for which Franklin valued the Doctor most

were his public spirit and philanthropy. He was well known in Philadelphia,

and, when Franklin arrived in London in 1757, he was actively assisted by

the Doctor in his effort to secure a settlement of the dispute over

taxation between the Pennsylvania Assembly and the Proprietaries.

Afterwards, when Franklin's second mission to England was coming to an end,

the Doctor was drawn deeply into a vain attempt made by Lord Howe and his

sister and David Barclay, another Quaker friend of Franklin, to compose the

American controversy by an agreement with Franklin. For this business,

among other reasons, because of "his daily Visits among the Great, in the

Practice of his Profession," of which Franklin speaks in his history of

these negotiations, he would have been a most helpful ally; if the quarrel

had not become so embittered. But, as it was, the knot, which the

negotiators were striving to disentangle, was too intricate for anything

but the edge of the sword. When the negotiations came to nothing, the good

Doctor, who knew the sentiments of "the Great" in London at that time, if

any private person did, had no advice to give to Franklin except, when he

returned to America, to get certain of the Doctor's friends in

Philadelphia, and two or three other persons together, and to inform them

that, whatever specious pretences were offered by the English ministry,

they were all hollow, and that to obtain a larger field, on which to fatten

a herd of worthless parasites, was all that was regarded. It was a bad day,

indeed, for England when one of the best men in the land could hold such

language.

The silk experiment in Pennsylvania furnished still another congenial field

for the co-operation of Franklin and Doctor Fothergill; and, in a letter to

Franklin, the latter also declared in startlingly modern terms that, in the

warmth of his affection for mankind, he could wish to see "the institution

of a College of Justice, where the claims of sovereigns should be weighed,

an award given, and war only made on him who refused submission."

"Dr. Fothergill, who was among the best men I have known, and a great

promoter of useful projects," is the way in which Franklin alludes to the

Doctor in the _Autobiography_. He then states in the same connection the

plan that he submitted to the Doctor for "the more effectual cleaning and

keeping clean the streets of London and Westminster"; but this plan, though

not unworthy of the public zeal and ingenuity of its author, is too

embryonic, when contrasted with modern municipal methods, and too tamely

suggestive of the broom and dust-pan of ordinary domestic housekeeping, to

deserve detailed attention.

Franklin was eminently what Dr. Johnson called a "clubable" man. When in

England, he often dined at the London Coffee House in Ludgate Hill with

the group of scientific men and liberal clergymen, who frequented the

place, and of whom he spoke on one occasion as "that excellent Collection

of good Men, the Club at the _London_." He also sometimes dined at St.

Paul's Coffee House and the Dog Tavern on Garlick Hill, and with the

Society of Friends to the Cause of Liberty at Paul's Head Tavern, Cateaton

Street, where, upon every 4th day of November, the landing of King William

and the Glorious Revolution were enthusiastically toasted. When he ate or

drank at a club, he liked to do so in an atmosphere of free thought and

free speech. Religion, spiced with heresy, and Politics flavored with

liberalism, were the kinds of religion and politics that best suited his

predilections. It was at St. Paul's Coffee House that he became acquainted

with Dr. Richard Price, the celebrated clergyman and economist, who was

then preaching every Sunday afternoon at Newington Green, where Franklin

advised Sir John Pringle to go to hear in the Doctor a preacher of

_rational_ Christianity. It is probable that Sir John, in inquiring of

Franklin where he could go to hear such a preacher, was moved rather by

curiosity than piety; for Franklin wrote to Dr. Price: "At present I

believe he has no view of attending constantly anywhere, but now and then

only as it may suit his convenience."

The acquaintance between Franklin and Doctor Price, once formed, became a

deeply-rooted friendship, and on Franklin's part it was accompanied by a

degree of admiration for the Doctor's abilities which hurried him on one

occasion into language that had little in common with the sober language in

which his judgments were usually pronounced. Of Doctor Price's _Appeal to

the Public on the Subject of the National Debt_, he wrote to the author in

the most enthusiastic terms, "it being in my Opinion," he said,

"consider'g the profound Study, & steady Application of Mind that the

Work required, & the sound Judgment with which it is executed, and its

great and important Utility to the Nation, the foremost Production of human

Understanding, that this Century has afforded us." And to Franklin on one

occasion this friend wrote that he considered his friendship one of the

honors and blessings of his life.

When the American controversy arose, Dr. Price zealously espoused the cause

of the Colonies, and this still further strengthened the friendship between

the two. For his _Observations on Civil Liberty and the Justice and Policy

of the War with America_, the City of London presented him with the freedom

of the city in a gold box of fifty pounds value; and so outspoken was he in

the expression of his political convictions that Franklin wrote to John

Winthrop in 1777 that "his Friends, on his Acct, were under some

Apprehensions from the Violence of Government, in consequence of his late

excellent Publications in favour of Liberty." Indeed, so near was he to

making the American cause absolutely his own that Congress, while the

American War was still raging, even invited him to become an American

citizen and to assist in regulating the American finances, but that was one

step further than he was willing to go. In a letter to Joseph Priestley,

shortly after the Battle of Bunker's Hill, Franklin makes an amusing

allusion to the mathematical genius of Dr. Price which was equal to the

abstrusest problems involved in the calculation of annuities.

Britain [he said], at the expense of three millions,

has killed one hundred and fifty Yankees this campaign,

which is twenty thousand pounds a head; and at Bunker's

Hill she gained a mile of ground, half of which she

lost again by our taking post on Ploughed Hill. During

the same time sixty thousand children have been born in

America. From these _data_ his (Dr. Price's)

mathematical head will easily calculate the time and

expense necessary to kill us all, and conquer our whole

territory.

Always in the American controversy, Franklin relied upon the loins as well

as the hands of the Colonists for the final victory.

While mentioning Priestley, we might recall the compliment in a letter from

Franklin to Dr. Price, in which the former brought the names of Priestley

and Price into a highly honorable conjunction. Speaking of dissensions in

the Royal Society, he said, "Disputes even on small Matters often produce

Quarrels for want of knowing how to differ decently; an Art which it is

said scarce anybody possesses but yourself and Dr. Priestley." Dr. Price

was one of the habitues of the London Coffee House, and, in Franklin's

letters to him from Passy, there are repeated references to the happy hours

that the writer had spent there. "I never think of the Hours I so happily

spent in that Company," he said in one letter, "without regretting that

they are never to be repeated: For I see no Prospect of an End to the

unhappy War in my Time." In another letter, he concluded with a heartfelt

wish that he might embrace Dr. Price once more, and enjoy his sweet society

in peace among his honest, worthy, ingenious friends at the _London_. In

another letter, after peace was assured, he said that he longed to see and

be merry with the Club, and, in a still later letter, he told Dr. Price

that he might "pop" in some Thursday evening when they least expected him.

In enclosing, on one occasion, to Dr. Price a copy of his Rabelaisian _jeu

d'esprit_ on "Perfumes," which was intended also for the eye of Priestley,

Franklin cracks an obscene joke at the expense of Priestley's famous

researches with regard to gases, but, when Dr. Price states in his reply,

"We have been entertained with the pleasantry of it, and the ridicule it

contains," we are again reminded that the eighteenth century was not the

twentieth.

Dr. Price was one of the correspondents to whom Franklin expounded his

theory that England's only chance for self-reformation was to render all

places unprofitable and the King too poor to give bribes and pensions.

Till this is done [he said], which can only be by a

Revolution (and I think you have not Virtue enough left

to procure one), your Nation will always be plundered,

and obliged to pay by Taxes the Plunderers for

Plundering and Ruining. Liberty and Virtue therefore

join in the call, _COME OUT OF HER, MY PEOPLE_!

In a later letter, he returns to the same subject in these words so

pregnant with meaning for a student of the political conditions which

palsied the influence of Chatham and Burke in their effort to avert the

American War:

As it seems to be a settled Point at present, that the

Minister must govern the Parliament, who are to do

everything he would have done; and he is to bribe them

to do this, and the People are to furnish the Money to

pay these Bribes; the Parliament appears to me a very

expensive Machine for Government, and I apprehend the

People will find out in time, that they may as well be

governed, and that it will be much cheaper to be

governed, by the Minister alone; no Parliament being

preferable to the present.

There are also some thoughtful observations in one of Franklin's letters to

Dr. Price on the limited influence of Roman and Grecian oratory, as

compared with the influence of the modern newspaper. "We now find," he

observed, "that it is not only right to strike while the iron is hot, but

that it may be very practicable to heat it by continually striking."

His last letter to Dr. Price was written less than a year before his own

death. It refers to the death of the Bishop of St. Asaph's, and once more

there is a mournful sigh from the Tree of Existence.

My Friends drop off one after another, when my Age and

Infirmities prevent my making new Ones [he groaned], &

if I still retained the necessary Activity and Ability,

I hardly see among the existing Generation where I

could make them of equal Goodness: So that the longer I

live I must expect to be very wretched. As we draw

nearer the Conclusion of Life, Nature furnishes with

more Helps to wean us from it, among which one of the

most powerful is the Loss of such dear Friends.

With Dr. Joseph Priestley, the famous clergyman and natural philosopher,

Franklin was very intimate. The discoveries of Priestley, especially his

discovery that carbonic acid gas is imbibed by vegetation, awakened

Franklin's keenest interest, and, some years before Priestley actually

received a medal from the Royal Society for his scientific achievements,

Franklin earnestly, though vainly, endeavored to obtain one for him. "I

find that you have set all the Philosophers of Europe at Work upon Fix'd

Air," he said in one of his letters to Priestley, "and it is with great

Pleasure I observe how high you stand in their Opinion; for I enjoy my

Friend's fame as my own." And no one who knows his freedom from all petty,

carking feelings of every sort, such as envy and jealousy, can doubt for a

moment that he did. For a time, fixed air aroused so much speculation that

it was thought that it might even be a remedy for putrid fevers and

cancers. The absorption of carbonic acid gas by vegetation is all simple

enough now, but it was not so simple when Priestley wrote to Franklin that

he had discovered that even aquatic plants imbibe pure air, and emit it as

excrementitious to them, in a dephlogisticated state. On one occasion,

Franklin paid his fellow-philosopher the compliment of saying that he knew

of no philosopher who started so much good game for the hunters after

knowledge as he did.

For a time Priestley enjoyed the patronage of Lord Shelburne, who, desirous

of having the company of a man of general learning to read with him, and

superintend the education of his children, took Priestley from his

congregation at Leeds, settled three hundred pounds a year upon him for ten

years, and two hundred pounds for life, with a house to live in near his

country seat. So Franklin stated in a letter to John Winthrop, when

Priestley was engaged in the task of putting Lord Shelburne's great library

into order. Subsequently patron and client separated amicably, but, before

they did, Priestley consulted Franklin as to whether he should go on with

the arrangement. The latter in a few judicious sentences counselled him to

do so until the end of the term of ten years, and, by way of illustrating

the frequent and troublesome changes, that human beings make without

amendment, and often for the worse, told this story of his youth:

In my Youth, I was a Passenger in a little Sloop,

descending the River Delaware. There being no Wind, we

were obliged, when the Ebb was spent, to cast anchor,

and wait for the next. The Heat of the Sun on the

Vessel was excessive, the Company Strangers to me, and

not very agreeable. Near the river Side I saw what I

took to be a pleasant green Meadow, in the middle of

which was a large shady Tree, where it struck my Fancy

I could sit and read, (having a Book in my Pocket,) and

pass the time agreeably till the tide turned. I

therefore prevail'd with the Captain to put me ashore.

Being landed, I found the greatest part of my Meadow

was really a Marsh, in crossing which, to come at my

Tree, I was up to my knees in Mire; and I had not

placed myself under its Shade five Minutes, before the

Muskitoes in Swarms found me out, attack'd my Legs,

Hands, and Face, and made my Reading and my Rest

impossible; so that I return'd to the Beach, and

call'd for the Boat to come and take me aboard again,

where I was oblig'd to bear the Heat I had strove to

quit, and also the Laugh of the Company. Similar Cases

in the Affairs of Life have since frequently fallen

under my Observation.

Deterrent as was the advice, pointed by such a graphic story, Priestley did

not take it, and, fortunately for him, the pleasant green meadow and large

shady tree to which he retired did not prove such a deceptive mirage. After

the separation, Lord Shelburne endeavored to induce him to renew their

former relation, but he declined.

Priestley was one of the witnesses of the baiting, to which Franklin was

subjected at the Cockpit, on account of the Hutchinson letters, on the

famous occasion, of which it could be well said by every thoughtful

Englishman a little later in the words of the ballad of Chevy-Chase,

"The child may rue that is unborne

The hunting of that day."

Or "the speaking" of that day, as Lord Campbell has parodied the lines.

Priestley was also among those eye-witnesses of the scene, who testified to

the absolutely impassive countenance with which Franklin bore the ordeal.

As he left the room, however, he pressed Priestley's hand in a way that

indicated much feeling. The next day, they breakfasted together, and

Franklin told Priestley "that, if he had not considered the thing for which

he had been so much insulted, as one of the best actions of his life, and

what he should certainly do again in the same circumstances, he could not

have supported it."

To Priestley also the world was first indebted for knowledge of the fact

that, when Franklin afterwards came to sign in France the Treaty of

Alliance between that country and the United States, he took pains to wear

the same suit of spotted Manchester velvet that he wore when he was

treated with such indecency at the Cockpit.

From France Franklin wrote to Priestley a letter expressing the horror--for

no other term is strong enough to describe the sentiment--in which he held

the unnatural war between Great Britain and her revolted Colonies.

The Hint you gave me jocularly [he said], that you did

not quite despair of the Philosopher's Stone, draws

from me a Request, that, when you have found it, you

will take care to lose it again; for I believe in my

conscience, that Mankind are wicked enough to continue

slaughtering one another as long as they can find Money

to pay the Butchers. But, of all the Wars in my time,

this on the part of England appears to me the

wickedest; having no Cause but Malice against Liberty,

and the Jealousy of Commerce. And I think the Crime

seems likely to meet with its proper Punishment; a

total loss of her own Liberty, and the Destruction of

her own Commerce.

But Franklin was not too incensed to have his joke in this same letter over

even such a grim subject for merriment as powder. "When I was at the camp

before Boston," he declared, "the Army had not 5 Rounds of Powder a Man.

This was kept a Secret even from our People. The World wonder'd that we so

seldom fir'd a Cannon; we could not afford it."

Another English friend of Franklin was Benjamin Vaughan, the son of a West

Indian planter, and at one time the private secretary of Lord Shelburne.

His family was connected with the House of Bedford, and his wife, Sarah

Manning, was an aunt of the late Cardinal Manning. To Vaughan the

reputation of Franklin is doubly indebted. In 1779, he brought out a new

edition of Franklin's writings, and it was partly the entreaties of Abel

James and himself which induced Franklin to continue the _Autobiography_,

after work on it had been long suspended by its author because of the

demands of the Revolution on his time. The spirit, in which the edition of

Franklin's writings was prepared, found expression in the preface. "Can

_Englishmen_," Vaughan asked, "read these things and not sigh at reflecting

that the _country_ which could produce their author, was once without

controversy _their own_!"

Before Franklin left France he longed to pay another visit to England, and

this matter is touched upon in a letter to Vaughan which sheds a sidelight

upon the intimacy which existed between the two men.

By my doubts of the propriety of my going soon to

London, [he said], I meant no reflection on my friends

or yours. If I had any call there besides the pleasure

of seeing those whom I love, I should have no doubts.

If I live to arrive there, I shall certainly embrace

your kind invitation, and take up my abode with you.

Some of the sagest observations ever made by Franklin are found in his

letters to Vaughan, and several of his happy stories. The following

reflections, prompted by English restraints upon commerce, were not

intended to be taken literally, but they contain profound insight enough to

merit transcription.

It is wonderful how preposterously the affairs of this

world are managed. Naturally one would imagine, that

the interest of a few individuals should give way to

general interest; but individuals manage their affairs

with so much more application, industry, and address,

than the public do theirs, that general interest most

commonly gives way to particular. We assemble

parliaments and councils, to have the benefit of their

collected wisdom, but we necessarily have, at the same

time, the inconvenience of their collected passions,

prejudices, and private interests. By the help of

these, artful men overpower their wisdom, and dupe its

possessors; and if we may judge by the acts, _arrets_,

and edicts, all the world over, for regulating

commerce, an assembly of great men is the greatest fool

upon earth.

When Franklin sat down to write this letter, Vaughan had asked him what

remedy he had for the growing luxury of his country which gave so much

offence to all English travellers without exception. In replying to this

rather tactless question, Franklin's pen ran on until he had completed not

so much a letter as an economic essay.

Our People [he begins] are hospitable, and have indeed

too much Pride in displaying upon their Tables before

Strangers the Plenty and Variety that our Country

affords. They have the Vanity, too, of sometimes

borrowing one another's Plate to entertain more

splendidly. Strangers being invited from House to

House, and meeting every Day with a Feast, imagine what

they see is the ordinary Way of living of all the

Families where they dine; when perhaps each Family

lives a Week after upon the Remains of the Dinner

given. It is, I own, a Folly in our People to give

_such Offence to English Travellers_. The first part of

the Proverb is thereby verified, that _Fools make

Feasts_. I wish in this Case the other were as true,

_and Wise Men eat them_. These Travellers might, one

would think, find some Fault they could more decently

reproach us with, than that of our excessive Civility

to them as Strangers.

With this introduction, he proceeds to say a good word for luxury. "Is not

the Hope of one day being able to purchase and enjoy Luxuries a great Spur

to Labour and Industry?" he asked. And this question brought up one of the

inevitable stories.

The Skipper of a Shallop, employed between Cape May and

Philadelphia, had done us some small Service, for which

he refused Pay. My Wife, understanding that he had a

Daughter sent her as a Present a new-fashioned Cap.

Three Years After, this Skipper being at my House with

an old Farmer of Cape May, his Passenger, he mentioned

the Cap, and how much his Daughter had been pleased

with it. "But," says he, "it proved a dear Cap to our

Congregation." "How so?" "When my Daughter appeared in

it at Meeting, it was so much admired, that all the

Girls resolved to get such Caps from Philadelphia, and

my Wife and I computed, that the whole could not have

cost less than a hundred Pound." "True," says the

Farmer, "but you do not tell all the Story. I think the

Cap was nevertheless an Advantage to us, for it was the

first thing that put our Girls upon Knitting worsted

Mittens for Sale at Philadelphia, that they might have

wherewithal to buy Caps and Ribbands there, and you

know that that Industry has continued, and is likely to

continue and increase to a much greater Value, and

answer better Purposes." Upon the whole, I was more

reconciled to this little Piece of Luxury, since not

only the Girls were made happier by having fine Caps,

but the Philadelphians by the Supply of warm Mittens.

Then he argues still further as follows that luxury may not always be such

an evil as it seems:

A Shilling spent idly by a Fool, may be picked up by a

Wiser Person, who knows better what to do with it. It

is therefore not lost. A vain, silly Fellow builds a

fine House, furnishes it richly, lives in it

expensively, and in few years ruins himself; but the

Masons, Carpenters, Smiths, and other honest Tradesmen

have been by his Employ assisted in maintaining and

raising their Families; the Farmer has been paid for

his labour, and encouraged, and the Estate is now in

better Hands.

There were exceptional cases, of course. "If there be a Nation, for

Instance, that exports its Beef and Linnen, to pay for its Importation of

Claret and Porter, while a great Part of its People live upon Potatoes, and

wear no Shirts, wherein does it differ from the Sot, who lets his Family

starve, and sells his Clothes to buy Drink." He meant Ireland, it is

needless to add. A little in this way, he confessed, was the exchange of

American victuals for West Indian rum and sugar.

The existence of so much want and misery in the world, he thought, was due

to the employment of men and women in works that produce neither the

necessaries nor the conveniences of life. Such people, aided by those who

do nothing, consume the necessaries raised by the laborious. This idea, he

developed with his inborn lucidity, ending, however, of course, with the

reflection that we should naturally expect from a man, who was so

thoroughly in touch with his kind, that, upon the whole, the quantity of

industry and prudence among mankind exceeded the quantity of idleness and

folly.

This "long, rambling Letter" he called it--this "brief, pointed and

masterly letter," we term it--concludes quite in the style of one of Poor

Richard's dissertations:

Almost all the Parts of our Bodies require some

Expence. The Feet demand Shoes; the Legs, Stockings;

the rest of the Body, Clothing; and the Belly, a good

deal of Victuals. _Our_ Eyes, tho' exceedingly useful,

ask, when reasonable, only the cheap Assistance of

Spectacles, which could not much impair our Finances.

But _the Eyes of other People_ are the Eyes that ruin

us. If all but myself were blind, I should want neither

fine Clothes, fine Houses, nor fine Furniture.

Another letter to Vaughan is really an essay on the Criminal Laws and the

practice of privateering. And a wise, humane and sprightly essay it is,

fully worthy of a man, who was entirely too far in advance of his age to

approve the savage English laws, which hanged a thief for stealing a horse,

and had no better answer to make to the culprit, when he pleaded that it

was hard to hang a man for _only_ stealing a horse, than the reply of Judge

Burnet: "Man, thou art not to be hanged _only_ for stealing, but that

horses may not be stolen." Not unworthy either was this essay of a man

whose benevolence was too clear-sighted and generous to be cheated by the

pretence that the practice of privateering has its root in anything better

than the rapacity of the highwayman. A highwayman, he said, was as much a

robber, when he plundered in a gang, as when single; and a nation, that

made an unjust war, was only a great gang. How could England, which had

commissioned no less than seven hundred gangs of privateering robbers, he

asked, have the face to condemn the crime of robbery in individuals, and

hang up twenty criminals in a morning. It naturally put one in mind of a

Newgate anecdote. "One of the Prisoners complain'd, that in the Night

somebody had taken his Buckles out of his Shoes; 'What, the Devil!' says

another, 'have we then _Thieves_ among us? It must not be suffered, let us

search out the Rogue, and pump him to death."

Vaughan was a prolix correspondent, and in reading his letters we cannot

but be reminded at times of the question put to him by Franklin, when

inveighing against the artifices adopted by booksellers for the purpose of

padding books. After remarking that they were puffed up to such an extent

that the selling of paper seemed the object, and printing on it, only the

pretence, he said, "You have a law, I think, against butchers blowing of

veal to make it look fatter; why not one against booksellers' blowing of

books to make them look bigger."

Vaughan was among the friends who did not fail to hasten to Southampton

when Franklin touched there on his return from France to America.

In what affectionate esteem Franklin held his two English friends, Dr. John

Hawkesworth, the author and writer of oratorios, and John Stanley, the

blind musician and organist of the Society of the Inner Temple, we have

already seen. Stanley composed the music for Dr. Hawkesworth's oratorios

_Zimri_ and _The Fall of Egypt_, and like music and words the two friends

themselves were blended in the mind of Franklin. Writing in the latter

years of his life to another English friend of his, Thomas Jordan, the

brewer, who had recently sent him a cask of porter, he had this to say

about them, in connection with the two satellites of Georgium Sidus, which

Herschel had just discovered.

Let us hope, my friend, that, when free from these

bodily embarrassments, we may roam together through

some of the systems he has explored, conducted by some

of our old companions already acquainted with them.

Hawkesworth will enliven our progress with his

cheerful, sensible converse, and Stanley accompany the

music of the spheres.

Several times, in his letter, Franklin refers to Hawkesworth as the "good

Doctor Hawkesworth," and it was from him that he learned to call Strahan

"Straney."

Another English friend of Franklin was John Sargent, a London merchant, a

director of the Bank of England, and a member of Parliament. The friendship

was shared by Mrs. Sargent, "whom I love very much," Franklin said in one

of his letters to her husband. After his return from his second mission to

England, he wrote to Sargent, asking him to receive the balance due him by

Messrs. Browns and Collinson, and keep it for him or his children. "It may

possibly," he declared, "soon be all I shall have left: as my American

Property consists chiefly of Houses in our Seaport Towns, which your

Ministry have begun to burn, and I suppose are wicked enough to burn them

all." In connection with Sargent, it may also be mentioned that he was one

of the applicants with Franklin for the Ohio grant, and that it was at his

country seat at Halstead, in Kent, that Lord Stanhope called for the

purpose of taking Franklin to Hayes, the country seat of Chatham, where

Chatham and Franklin met for the first time.

Another English friend of Franklin was John Canton, who was, however,

rather a scientific than a social comrade, though a fellow-tourist of his

on one of his summer excursions; and still another was Dr. Alexander Small,

for whom he cherished a feeling of real personal affection. In one letter

to Small, he tells him that he had found relief from the gout by exposing

his naked foot, when he was in bed, and thereby promoting the process of

transpiration. He gave the fact, he said, to Small, in exchange for his

receipt for tartar emetic, because the commerce of philosophy as well as

other commerce was best promoted by taking care to make returns. In another

letter to Small, there is a growl for the American Loyalists.

As to the Refugees [he observed], whom you think we

were so impolitic in rejecting, I do not find that they

are miss'd here, or that anybody regrets their Absence.

And certainly they must be happier where they are,

under the Government they admire; and be better

receiv'd among a People, whose Cause they espous'd and

fought for, than among those who cannot so soon have

forgotten the Destruction of their Habitations, and the

spilt Blood of their dearest Friends and near

Relations.

Then there is a reference in this letter to the learned and ingenious

friends, who had left Dr. Small and himself to join the majority in the

world of spirits.

Every one of them [he said] now knows more than all of

us they have left behind. It is to me a comfortable

Reflection, that, since we must live forever in a

future State, there is a sufficient Stock of Amusement

in reserve for us, to be found in constantly learning

something new to Eternity, the present Quantity of

human Ignorance infinitely exceeding that of human

Knowledge. Adieu, my dear Friend, and believe me, in

whatever World, yours most affectionately.

In a subsequent letter, there is a softer word for the Loyalists. He

believed, he said, that fear and error rather than malice occasioned their

desertion of their country's cause and the adoption of the King's. The

public resentment against them was then so far abated that none, who asked

leave to return, were refused, and many of them then lived in America much

at their ease. But he thought that the politicians, who were a sort of

people that loved to fortify themselves in their projects by precedent,

were perhaps waiting, before they ventured to propose the restoration of

the confiscated estates of the Loyalists, to see whether the English

Government would restore the forfeited estates in Scotland to the Scotch,

those in Ireland to the Irish and those in England to the Welsh! He was

glad that the Loyalists, who had not returned to America, had received, or

were likely to receive, some compensation for their losses from England,

but it did not seem so clearly consistent with the wisdom of Parliament for

it to provide such compensation on behalf of the King, who had seduced

these Loyalists by his proclamations. Some mad King, in the future, might

set up such action on the part of Parliament as a precedent, as was

realized by the Council of Brutes in the old fable, a copy of which he

enclosed. The fable, of course, was not an old fable at all, but one of his

own productions, in which the horse with the "boldness and freedom that

became the nobleness of his nature," succeeded in convincing the council of

the beasts, against the views of the wolves and foxes, that the lion should

bestow no reward upon the mongrels, who, sprung in part from wolves and

foxes, and corrupted by royal promises of great rewards, had deserted the

honest dogs, when the lion, notwithstanding the attachment of these dogs to

him, had, under the influence of evil counsellors, contracted an aversion

to them, condemned them unheard and ordered his tigers, leopards and

panthers to attack and destroy them. In this letter, there is another

reference to the reformed prayer-book which Dr. Small and good Mrs.

Baldwin had done him the honor, as we have seen, to approve. The things of

this world, he said, took up too much of the little time left to him for

him to undertake anything like a reformation in matters of religion. When

we can sow good seed, we should, however, do it, and await with patience,

when we can do no better, Nature's time for their sprouting.

A later letter assured Dr. Small that Franklin still loved England, and

wished it prosperity, but it had only another growl for the Loyalists.

Someone had said, he declared, that we are commanded to forgive our

enemies, but that we are nowhere commanded to forgive our friends. The

Loyalists, after uniting with the savages for the purpose of burning the

houses of the American Whigs, and murdering and scalping their wives and

children, had left them for the Government of their King in England and

Nova Scotia. "We do not miss them," he said, "nor wish their return; nor do

we envy them their present happiness."[36]

This letter also mildly deprecates the honor that Small did him in naming

him with Timoleon. "I am like him only in retiring from my public labours,"

he declared, "which indeed my stone, and other infirmities of age, have

made indispensably necessary."

The enthusiasm of the French people had drawn so freely upon the heroes of

antiquity for a parallel to him that Dr. Small, perhaps, had to put up

with Timoleon in default of a better classical congener.

Other English friends of Franklin were John Alleyne, Edward Bridgen, Edmund

Burke, Mrs. Thompson, John Whitehurst, Anthony Tissington, Thomas Viny and

Caleb Whitefoord. Our attention has already been called to his pithy

reflections on early marriages in one of his letters to John Alleyne.

Treat your Wife [he said, in the concluding sentences

of this admirable letter] always with Respect; it will

procure Respect to you, not from her only but from all

that observe it. Never use a slighting Expression to

her, even in jest, for Slights in Jest, after frequent

bandyings, are apt to end in angry earnest. Be studious

in your Profession, and you will be learned. Be

industrious and frugal, and you will be rich. Be sober

and temperate, and you will be healthy. Be in general

virtuous, and you will be happy. At least, you will, by

such Conduct, stand the best Chance for such

Consequences.

In another letter to Alleyne, with his unerring good sense, he makes short

work of the perverse prejudice against intermarriage with a deceased wife's

sister which was destined to die so hard in the English mind.

To Edward Bridgen, a merchant of London, Franklin referred in a letter to

Governor Alexander Martin of North Carolina as "a particular Friend of mine

and a zealous one of the American Cause." The object of the letter was to

reclaim from confiscation property in that state belonging to Bridgen. And

it was to Bridgen that Franklin made the suggestion that, instead of

repeating continually upon every half penny the dull story that everybody

knew (and that it would have been no loss to mankind if nobody had ever

known) that George III. was King of Great Britain, France and Ireland,

etc., etc., there should be inscribed on the coin some important proverb

of Solomon, some pious moral, prudential or economical precept, calculated

to leave an impression upon the mind, especially of young persons, such as

on some, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom"; on others,

"Honesty is the best Policy"; on others, "He that by the plow would thrive,

himself must either hold or drive"; on others, "Keep thy Shop, and thy Shop

will keep thee"; on others, "A penny saved is a penny got"; on others, "He

that buys what he has no need of, will soon be forced to sell his

necessaries"; and on others, "Early to bed and early to rise, will make a

man healthy, wealthy, and wise."

With Edmund Burke Franklin does not appear to have been intimate, but they

knew each other well enough for the former in a letter to the latter to

term the friendship between them an "old friendship." It was Burke who

remarked, when Franklin was examined before the House of Commons on

American affairs, that it was as if a school-master was being catechized by

his pupils. For every reason, the judgment of so great a man about such an

incident has its value, but among other reasons because Burke was accounted

one of the best-informed men in England in relation to American affairs.

The only glimpse we obtain of Mrs. Thompson is in a letter written to her

by Franklin from Paris, shortly after his arrival in France in 1776, but

the raillery of this letter is too familiar in tone to have marked the

course of anything but real intimacy.

You are too early, _Hussy_ [he wrote], (as well as too

saucy,) in calling me _Rebel_; you should wait for the

Event, which will determine whether it is a _Rebellion_

or only a _Revolution_. Here the Ladies are more civil;

they call us _les Insurgens_, a Character that usually

pleases them: And methinks all other Women who smart,

or have smarted, under the Tyranny of a bad Husband,

ought to be fixed in Revolution Principles, and act

accordingly.

Then Mrs. Thompson is told some gossipy details about a common friend whom

Franklin had seen during the preceding spring at New York, and these are

succeeded by some gay sallies with regard to Mrs. Thompson's restlessness.

Pray learn [he said], if you have not already learnt,

like me, to be pleased with other People's Pleasures,

and happy with their Happiness, when none occur of your

own; and then perhaps you will not so soon be weary of

the Place you chance to be in, and so fond of Rambling

to get rid of your _Ennui_. I fancy you have hit upon

the right Reason of your being Weary of St. Omer's,

viz. that you are out of Temper, which is the effect of

full Living and Idleness. A Month in Bridewell, beating

Hemp, upon Bread and Water, would give you Health and

Spirits, and subsequent Cheerfulness and Contentment

with every other Situation. I prescribe that Regimen

for you, my dear, in pure good will, without a Fee. And

let me tell you, if you do not get into Temper, neither

Brussels nor Lisle will suit you. I know nothing of the

Price of Living in either of those Places; but I am

sure a single Woman, as you are, might with Economy

upon two hundred Pounds a year maintain herself

comfortably anywhere, and me into the Bargain. Do not

invite me in earnest, however, to come and live with

you; for, being posted here, I ought not to comply, and

I am not sure I should be able to refuse.

This letter was written shortly after Franklin's arrival in France, but he

had already caught the infection of French gallantry. It closes with a

lifelike portrait of himself.

I know you wish you could see me [he said], but, as you

can't, I will describe myself to you. Figure me in your

mind as jolly as formerly, and as strong and hearty,

only a few years older; very plainly dress'd, wearing

my thin gray strait hair, that peeps out under my only

Coiffure, a fine Fur Cap, which comes down my Forehead

almost to my Spectacles. Think how this must appear

among the Powder'd Heads of Paris! I wish every

gentleman and Lady in France would only be so obliging

as to follow my Fashion, comb their own Heads as I do

mine, dismiss their _Friseurs_, and pay me half the

Money they paid to them. You see, the gentry might well

afford this, and I could then enlist those _Friseurs_,

who are at least 100,000, and with the Money I would

maintain them, make a Visit with them to England, and

dress the Heads of your Ministers and Privy

Counsellors; which I conceive to be at present _un peu

derangees_. Adieu, Madcap; and believe me ever, your

affectionate Friend and humble Servant.

John Whitehurst, who was a maker of watches and philosophical instruments,

and the author of an _Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the

Earth_, and his friend, Anthony Tissington, were residents of Derbyshire.

Some of Whitehurst's letters to Franklin are still in existence, but none

from Franklin to Whitehurst are. A letter from Franklin to Tissington has

preserved one of the writer's characteristic stories. After speaking of the

rheumatic pains, to which Mrs. Tissington was subject, he said:

'Tis a most wicked Distemper, & often puts me in mind

of the Saying of a Scotch Divine to some of his

Brethren who were complaining that their Flocks had of

late been infected with _Arianism_ and _Socinianism_.

Mine, says he, is infected with a worse ism than either

of those.--Pray, Brother, what can that be?--It is, the

_Rheumatism_.

Thomas Viny was a wheel manufacturer of Tenterden, Kent. In a letter to

him, Franklin tells him that he cannot without extreme reluctance think of

using any arguments to persuade him to remove to America, because of the

pain that the removal would occasion to Viny's brother. Possibly, however,

he added, Viny might afterwards judge it not amiss, when the many children

that he was likely to have, were grown up, to plant one of them in America,

where he might prepare an asylum for the rest should any great calamity,

which might God avert, befall England. A man he knew, who had a number of

sons, used to say that he chose to settle them at some distance from each

other, for he thought they throve better, as he remarked that cabbages,

growing too near together, were not so likely to come to a head.

I shall be asleep before that time [Franklin

continued], otherwise he might expect and command my

best Advice and Assistance. But as the Ancients who

knew not how to write had a Method of transmitting

Friendships to Posterity; the Guest who had been

hospitably entertain'd in a strange Country breaking a

Stick with every one who did him a kindness; and the

Producing such a Tally at any Time afterwards, by a

Descendant of the Host, to a Son or Grandson of the

Guest, was understood as a good Claim to special Regard

besides the Common Rights of Hospitality: So if this

Letter should happen to be preserv'd, your Son may

produce it to mine as an Evidence of the Good will that

once subsisted between their Fathers, as an

Acknowledgment of the Obligations you laid me under by

your many Civilities when I was in your Country and a

Claim to all the Returns due from me if I had been

living.

Another letter from Franklin to Viny was written at Passy. He joined most

heartily he said with Viny in his prayers that the Almighty, who had

favored the just cause, would perfect his work, and establish freedom in

the New World as an asylum for those of the Old who deserved it. He thought

the war a detestable one, and grieved much at the mischief and misery it

was occasioning to many; his only consolation being that he did all in his

power to prevent it. What a pleasure it would be to him on his return to

America to see his old friend and his children settled there! "I hope,"

Franklin concluded, "he will find Vines and Fig-trees there for all of

them, under which we may sit and converse, enjoying Peace and Plenty, a

good Government, good Laws, and Liberty, without which Men lose half their

Value."

Caleb Whitefoord resided at No. 8 Craven Street, London, or next door to

Mrs. Stevenson's, where Franklin resided during his two missions to

England, and the friendship between Franklin and himself, though very

cordial on Whitefoord's part, would seem to have been on Franklin's part,

though cordial, the friendship mainly of mere propinquity.[37]

Far more significant were the ties which bound Franklin to such English

friends as Peter Collinson, the Rev. George Whitefield, Lord Le Despencer,

James Hutton, David Hartley and George Whatley.

Peter Collinson was a London mercer who had a considerable correspondence

with America. He not only enjoyed an acquaintance with men of prominence

and influence in the Colonies, but he earnestly interested himself in

promoting the production of American flax, hemp, silk and wine. He was a

fellow of the Royal Society, besides being one of the founders of the

Society of Antiquaries, and it was directly due to the electric tube sent

over by him to the Library Company of Philadelphia that Franklin entered

upon those experiments in electricity which he communicated to Collinson in

a series of memorable letters, that brought lasting renown to their author

when given to the world by Collinson. In a letter to Michael Collinson,

Franklin speaks of Peter Collinson as our "dear departed Friend," and pays

a feeling tribute to his unselfish patronage of the Library at

Philadelphia. He alludes to the valuable presents made to the Library by

Collinson and others, whose generosity had been kindled by Collinson's

zeal, and he states the remarkable fact that for more than thirty years

successively Collinson had participated in the annual selection of books

for the Library, and had shouldered the whole burden of buying them in

London, and shipping them to Philadelphia without ever charging or even

accepting any consideration for his trouble. Nay more, during the same

time, he had transmitted to the directors of the Library Company the

earliest account of every new European improvement in Agriculture and the

Arts, or discovery in Philosophy. Curious in botany as Collinson may have

been, it is not hazardous to say that he never gathered or sowed any seed

more fruitful than these benefactions, and we can readily understand how

deeply his friendship must have been cherished by a spirit so congenial

with his as that of Franklin. They were friends before they ever met, but

it was not until Franklin arrived in London on his first mission to England

that they greeted each other face to face. Franklin's first letter to

America, written the day after he reached London, was hastily penned at

Collinson's house, and, the next day, John Hanbury, the great Virginia

merchant, by an arrangement with Collinson, called for Franklin in his

carriage, and conveyed him to the house of Lord Granville for an interview

with that nobleman. The letters from Franklin to Collinson on the subject

of electricity are, we hardly need say, the most important of the former's

letters to him, but very valuable, too, are some of his observations in

other letters to his correspondent on political conditions in Pennsylvania

and the relations between the Colonies and the mother country. To the

scientific letters and to these observations we shall have occasion to

revert further on. Beyond a reference to some black silk, sent by Collinson

to Deborah, with a generous disregard of the fact that the fowl meadow

grass seed that Franklin had sent to him from America never came up, the

correspondence between Collinson and Franklin is marked by few intimate

features. It was, however, on the back of a letter from Franklin to

Collinson, in which the former condoled with the latter on the loss of his

wife, that this good man, for such we must believe Collinson to have been,

indorsed these singular comments, the offspring probably of purely morbid

self-reproach:

There was no occasion of any Phylosophy on this ever to

be lamented occasion. Peter Collinson had few feelings

but for Himself. The same Principle that led him to

deprive his son of his Birthright when that son lay in

the Agonies of Death and knew not what he put his hand

to, supported Peter Collinson in the loss of the best

of Women in a manner that did no Honour to his

Feelings, his Gratitude or his Humanity.

The eye of the reader has already been drawn to the Rev. George Whitefield,

whose eloquence, we are told by Franklin in the _Autobiography_, "had a

wonderful power over the hearts and purses of his hearers." After the death

of Whitefield, Franklin paid this handsome tribute to him in a letter to

Robert Morris and Thomas Leach. "I knew him intimately upwards of thirty

years. His Integrity, Disinterestedness, and indefatigable Zeal in

prosecuting every good Work, I have never seen equalled, I shall never see

exceeded." To Franklin, too, we are indebted for a striking description of

his characteristics as an orator, when he came over to Philadelphia from

Ireland, and, after being at first permitted to preach in some churches,

was later compelled to preach in the fields, because the clergy took a

dislike to him, and refused him their pulpits.

He had a loud and clear voice, and articulated his

words and sentences so perfectly, that he might be

heard and understood at a great distance, especially as

his auditories, however numerous, observ'd the most

exact silence. He preach'd one evening from the top of

the Court-house steps, which are in the middle of

Market-Street, and on the west side of Second-Street,

which crosses it at right angles. Both streets were

fill'd with his hearers to a considerable distance.

Being among the hindmost in Market-Street, I had the

curiosity to learn how far he could be heard, by

retiring backwards down the street towards the river;

and I found his voice distinct till I came near

Front-Street, when some noise in the street obscur'd

it. Imagining then a semi-circle, of which my distance

should be the radius, and that it were fill'd with

auditors, to each of whom I allow'd two square feet, I

computed that he might well be heard by more than

thirty thousand. This reconcil'd me to the newspaper

accounts of his having preach'd to twenty-five thousand

people in the fields, and to the antient histories of

generals haranguing whole armies, of which I had

sometimes doubted.

By experience, Franklin came to distinguish easily between Whitefield's

newly composed sermons and those which he had often preached in the course

of his travels.

His delivery of the latter was so improv'd by frequent

repetitions that every accent, every emphasis, every

modulation of voice, was so perfectly well turn'd and

well plac'd, that, without being interested in the

subject, one could not help being pleas'd with the

discourse; a pleasure of much the same kind with that

receiv'd from an excellent piece of musick.

Notwithstanding the extraordinary influence of Whitefield's oratory over

his auditors, to which Franklin testifies so unqualifiedly, it is obvious

enough, as we have seen, that a nature so little given to extreme forms of

enthusiasm as that of Franklin could not but regard the hysteria produced

by it with some degree of contemptuous amusement.

Who [he asked in his Essay on "Shavers and Trimmers,"

in the _Pennsylvania Gazette_], has been more notorious

for shaving and fleecing, than that Apostle of

Apostles, that Preacher of Preachers, the Rev. Mr. G.

W.? But I forbear making farther mention of this

spiritual Shaver and Trimmer, lest I should affect the

Minds of my Readers as deeply as his Preaching has

affected their Pockets.

This was mere jesting on the part of a man to whom everything had its

humorous as well as its serious side. Very different in spirit are some of

the passages in Franklin's letters to Whitefield.

I am glad to hear [he wrote on one occasion] that you

have frequent opportunities of preaching among the

great. If you can gain them to a good and exemplary

life, wonderful changes will follow in the manners of

the lower ranks; for _ad exemplum regis_, etc. On this

principle, Confucius, the famous Eastern reformer,

proceeded. When he saw his country sunk in vice, and

wickedness of all kinds triumphant, he applied himself

first to the grandees; and having, by his doctrine, won

_them_ to the cause of virtue, the commons followed in

multitudes. The mode has a wonderful influence on

mankind; and there are numbers who, perhaps, fear less

the being in hell, than out of the fashion. Our most

western reformations began with the ignorant mob; and

when numbers of them were gained, interest and party

views drew in the wise and great. Where both methods

can be used, reformations are likely to be more speedy.

O that some method could be found to make them lasting!

He who discovers that will, in my opinion, deserve

more, ten thousand times, than the inventor of the

longitude.

Another letter from Franklin to Whitefield is not only distinguished by the

same missionary accent but also by the deep-seated loyalty to the English

Crown which was so slow in yielding first to disillusionment and then to

detestation. Alluding to Whitefield's desire to be the chaplain of an

American army, he said that he wished that they could be jointly employed

by the Crown to settle a colony on the Ohio.

What a glorious Thing [he exclaimed] it would be, to

settle in that fine Country a large strong Body of

Religious and Industrious People! What a Security to

the other Colonies; and Advantage to Britain, by

Increasing her People, Territory, Strength and

Commerce! Might it not greatly facilitate the

Introduction of pure Religion among the Heathen, if we

could, by such a Colony, show them a better Sample of

Christians than they commonly see in our Indian

Traders, the most vicious and abandoned Wretches of our

Nation?... Life, like a dramatic Piece, should not only

be conducted with Regularity, but methinks it should

finish handsomely. Being now in the last Act, I begin

to cast about for something fit to end with. Or if mine

be more properly compar'd to an Epigram, as some of its

few Lines are but barely tolerable, I am very desirous

of concluding with a bright Point. In such an

Enterprise I could spend the Remainder of Life with

Pleasure; and I firmly believe God would bless us with

Success, if we undertook it with a sincere Regard to

his Honour, the Service of our gracious King, and

(which is the same thing) the Publick Good.

From the joint enterprise of settling a colony on the Ohio with Whitefield

to the joint enterprise of abridging the Book of English Prayer with Lord

Le Despencer was a far cry, but not too far for Franklin, as we have seen.

Lord Le Despencer, or Sir Francis Dashwood, as he was known, when he was

one of the jolly monks of Medmenham Abbey, was numbered by Franklin among

his best friends, and at West Wycombe, the country seat of this nobleman,

Franklin spent many happy hours. On one occasion, he writes to his son that

he has passed sixteen days there most agreeably. On another occasion, he

tells him that he has just come to West Wycombe to spend a few days and

breathe a little fresh air. "I am in this House," he said, "as much at my

Ease as if it was my own; and the Gardens are a Paradise." After a journey

to Oxford, with Lord Le Despencer, he informed the same correspondent that

the former was very good to him on all occasions and seemed of late very

desirous of his company. Whatever else the owner of West Wycombe may have

been, Franklin's letters leave us no room to doubt that he was a capital

host.

To a very different type of character in every respect belonged James

Hutton, another dear friend of Franklin. He was a bookseller at the sign of

the Bible and Sun, west of Temple Bar, and for fifty-five years a zealous

member of the Moravian Church. His interest in the missionary labors of

that Church, his benevolence, which knew no sectarian limitations, his

sense and simplicity of manners won for him an honorable standing even in

Court Circles. We are told by William Temple Franklin that he was highly

esteemed by George III. and his consort, and was well known to many of the

English nobility and men of letters; not being refused admittance to the

highest ranks even at Buckingham House, though his ardent benevolence

inclined him greatly to neglect his own dress that he might better feed the

hungry and cover the naked. A man of that kind always had easy access to

the heart of Franklin, open though its hospitable portals were to other

friends of a very different description. In a letter to David Hartley from

Passy, Franklin speaks of Hutton in these terms: "An old Friend of mine,

Mr. Hutton, a Chief of the Moravians, who is often at the Queen's Palace,

and is sometimes spoken to by the King, was over here lately." In a letter

to Hutton himself from Passy, Franklin applies to him the term, "My dear

old friend," which with its different variations meant with him the

high-water mark of intimacy. Hutton is also brought to our sight, though in

a droll way, in the Craven Street _Gazette_, the mock Chronicle, in which

Franklin, with a delicacy and richness of humor all his own, pictures No. 7

Craven Street as a Court, Mrs. Stevenson as a Queen, with lords and ladies

in her train, and Hutton and himself as rivals for the good graces of Dolly

Blount, Polly's friend.

This Morning [the _Gazette_ notes, under date of

Tuesday, Sept. 25], my good Lord Hutton call'd at

Craven-Street House and enquir'd very respectfully &

affectionately concerning the Welfare of the Queen. He

then imparted to the big Man (Franklin himself) a Piece

of Intelligence important to them both, and but just

communicated by Lady Hawkesworth, viz. that the amiable

and delectable Companion, Miss D (orothea) B (lount),

had made a Vow to marry absolutely him of the two whose

Wife should first depart this Life. It is impossible to

express the various Agitations of Mind appearing in

both their Faces on this Occasion. _Vanity_ at the

Preference given them over the rest of Mankind;

_Affection_ to their present Wives, _Fear_ of losing

them, _Hope_, if they must lose them, to obtain the

proposed Comfort; _Jealousy_ of each other in case both

Wives should die together, &c. &c. &c.,--all working at

the same time jumbled their Features into inexplicable

Confusion. They parted at length with Professions &

outward Appearances indeed of ever-enduring Friendship,

but it was shrewdly suspected that each of them

sincerely wished Health & long Life to the other's

Wife; & that however long either of these Friends might

like to live himself, the other would be very well

pleas'd to survive him.

Hutton was one of the simple and warm-hearted friends of Franklin who

endeavored by their individual exertions to accelerate the restoration of

peace between Great Britain and America, and, like all of Franklin's

English friends, who kept up a correspondence with him, while the war was

going on, he had to read some scathing fulminations against England.

You have lost by this mad War [Franklin said in one

letter to Hutton], and the Barbarity with which it has

been carried on, not only the Government and Commerce

of America, and the public Revenues and private Wealth

arising from that Commerce, but what is more, you have

lost the Esteem, Respect, Friendship, and Affection of

all that great and growing People, who consider you at

present, and whose Posterity will consider you, as the

worst and wickedest Nation upon Earth.

Twelve days later, Franklin annexed a postscript to this letter which must

have been an even severer trial to Hutton's equanimity than the letter

itself.

I abominate with you [he said], all Murder, and I may

add, that the Slaughter of Men in an unjust Cause is

nothing less than Murder; I therefore never think of

your present Ministers and their Abettors, but with the

Image strongly painted in my View, of their Hands, red,

wet, and dropping with the Blood of my Countrymen,

Friends, and Relations.

Franklin's opinion of the King was imparted to Hutton in terms fully as

indignant. The letter, in which this was done, was prompted by a letter

from Hutton to a third person giving an account of some abominable murders

inflicted by American frontiersmen upon the poor Moravian Indians. This

time it was not English, but American hands that were red with blood, but

Franklin was resourceful enough all the same to fix the responsibility for

the murders by a train of indirect reasoning on the King. Why, he asked,

had a single man in England, who happened to love blood and to hate

Americans, been permitted to gratify that bad temper by hiring German

murderers, and joining them with his own to destroy, in a continued course

of bloody years, near 100,000 human creatures, many of them possessed of

useful talents, virtues and abilities to which he had no pretension! It was

he who had furnished the savages with hatchets and scalping knives, and

engaged them to fall upon defenceless American farmers, and murder them

with their wives and children, paying for their scalps, of which the

account kept in America already amounted, he had heard, to near two

thousand. Perhaps, the people of the frontiers, he declared, exasperated by

the cruelties of the Indians, had been induced to kill all Indians that

fell into their hands without distinction; so that even these horrid

murders of the poor Moravians might be laid to the King's charge.

And yet [said Franklin] this Man lives, enjoys all the

good Things this World can afford, and is surrounded by

Flatterers, who keep even his Conscience quiet by

telling him he is the best of Princes! I wonder at

this, but I can not therefore part with the comfortable

Belief of a Divine Providence; and the more I see the

Impossibility, from the number & extent of his Crimes,

of giving equivalent Punishment to a wicked Man in this

Life, the more I am convinc'd of a future State, in

which all that here appears to be wrong shall be set

right, all that is crooked made straight. In this Faith

let you & I, my dear Friend, comfort ourselves; it is

the only Comfort, in the present dark Scene of Things,

that is allowed us.

The friendship between Franklin and David Hartley had to endure the

concussion of some knocks even harder than these. Hartley was the son of

David Hartley, the philosopher, from whom Hartley Coleridge, the poet,

derived his name. He was a B. A. of Corpus Christi, Oxford, and a fellow of

Merton College, and represented Hull in Parliament from 1774 to 1780 and

from 1782 to 1784. An adherent of Lord Rockingham, and a warm friend of

Franklin, he was naturally enough selected as the British plenipotentiary

to assist in drawing up the treaty of peace between Great Britain and

America. Before this time, however, he had been engaged in a protracted

correspondence with Franklin, marked by a degree of liberality and humane

feeling on his part which did him great honor. To alleviate the condition

of American prisoners in England, to promote the exchange of these

prisoners and British prisoners in America, to bring about a reunion

between Great Britain and her colonies, and, that failing, a separation

attended by as little mutual animosity as possible, were the generous

objects to which his efforts were addressed. In pursuing these objects, he

must have found it difficult at times to submit meekly to some of the

ireful invective against his King, Parliament and People, which punctuates

Franklin's solicitation of his mediatory offices, in behalf of American

prisoners, and pleas for a peace between Great Britain and America,

attended by really generous concessions upon the part of Great Britain. The

year after his arrival in France as our minister, Franklin wrote to

Hartley:

As to our submitting to the government of Great

Britain, it is vain to think of it. She has given us,

by her numberless barbarities in the prosecution of the

war, and in the treatment of prisoners, by her malice

in bribing slaves to murder their masters, and savages

to massacre the families of farmers, with her baseness

in rewarding the unfaithfulness of servants, and

debauching the virtue of honest seamen, intrusted with

our property, so deep an impression of her depravity,

that we never again can trust her in the management of

our affairs and interests.

As the war went on, leaving its trail of blood and increasing hatred behind

it, his language at times becomes even more intense. About a year and a

half later, he wrote to Hartley, "We know that your King hates Whigs and

Presbyterians; that he thirsts for our Blood, of which he has already drunk

large Draughts; that his servile unprincipled Ministers are ready to

execute the Wickedest of his Orders, and his venal Parliament equally ready

to vote them just." This outburst was evoked by what he conceived to be a

cunning effort of the English Ministry to divide America and her French

ally. The next outburst was provoked by the same cause. "The Truth is," he

said, "we have no kind of Faith in your Government, which appears to us as

insidious and deceitful as it is unjust and cruel; its Character is that of

the Spider in Thomson,

"Cunning and fierce,

Mixture abhorr'd!!"

Finally, all the hurrying feelings aroused in him at times by what he

called "bloody and insatiable Malice and Wickedness" became condensed in an

abstract term so full of passion as "devilism." Franklin was not the man to

take hold of the handles of a plough and then turn back. In his

correspondence with Hartley, as with his other English friends, after he

entered upon his mission to France, is the clearest recognition of the

fact, to use his own robust figure of speech, that England had lost limbs

which would never grow again, and his unwavering resolution to give his

assent to nothing less than the complete independence of the Colonies. For

him, for his country, there were never more to be any connecting links

between Great Britain and America except those of mere international good

will and commercial comity. Upon propositions of every sort, looking to a

reconciliation between the two lands, he lingered solely for the purpose of

obtaining for America, when peace finally came, as large a measure of

territorial aggrandizement as he could possibly secure. Of a conciliatory

bill, of which Hartley sent him a copy, he said, "It might have erected a

Wall of Brass round England, if such a Measure had been adopted, when Fryar

Bacon's brazen Head cried out, TIME IS! But the wisdom of it was not seen,

till after the fatal Cry of TIME'S PAST!"

It was the almost pathetic desire of such correspondents of Franklin as

Hartley to save some sort of organic tie between the two countries from the

wreckage wrought by the fatal policy of the British Ministry, which makes

it difficult for us to read Franklin's French letters to men like Hutton

and Hartley without feeling that the harsh terms, which he often employed

in these letters about the English King, Parliament and People, were hardly

fair to that courageous and high-minded band of English patriots, who made

the American cause almost as much theirs as his own, and stopped only short

of treason in the assertion of their belief that the immemorial liberties

of England as well as the liberties of America were staked upon the issue

of the American contest. It was the extreme outspoken dissatisfaction, with

which English Whigs regarded the effort of the British Ministry to force

its own violent and technical views of colonial policy upon America, that

made it possible for Franklin to write to Englishmen as he did about their

government without exciting either frank or sullen resentment. But there

was undoubtedly still another reason with which politics had nothing to do.

These Whigs not only respected the manly candor, with which Franklin

expressed convictions that they knew had been formed by a singularly

enlightened, generous and sober mind, once devotedly attached by the

strongest ties of tradition and affection to the colonial connection

between Great Britain and America, but they had been too intimate with him

personally not to be aware that it was not in his nature to harbor any real

or lasting malignity of feeling towards anyone. And that this view of his

character was correct is shown by more than one feature of his

correspondence with Hartley. In a letter to Hartley, he said that, when

Hartley's nation was hiring all the cutthroats it could collect of all

countries and colors to destroy the Americans, it was hard to persuade the

Americans not to ask, or accept of, aid from any country that might be

prevailed with to grant it, and this from the hope that, though the British

then thirsted for their blood, and pursued them with fire and sword, they

might in some future time treat them kindly. But the outbreak does not seem

so fierce when he goes on to say, "America has been _forc'd_ and _driven_

into the Arms of France. She was a dutiful and virtuous Daughter. A cruel

Mother-in-law turn'd her out of Doors, defam'd her, and sought her Life.

All the World knows her Innocence, and takes her part; and her Friends hope

soon to see her honorably married." One of the peculiarities of that kindly

and facetious nature was that its sense of humor would at times work its

way even between the lines of formal state papers; to say nothing of

letters to a familiar friend on the conduct of an enemy. Nor could Hartley

doubt that the old well-springs of mirth and loving kindness were as full

as ever to overflowing, when, in response to a letter from him to Franklin,

containing the Scotch ballad, _Auld Robin Gray_, he received this lively

application of the ballad to existing conditions:

I cannot make an entire application of it to present

Circumstances; but, taking it in Parts, and changing

Persons, some of it is extremely _apropos_. First Jenie

may be supposed Old England, and Jamie, America. Jenie

laments the loss of Jamie, and recollects with Pain his

Love for her, his Industry in Business to promote her

Wealth and Welfare, and her own Ingratitude.

"Young Jamie loved me weel,

And sought me for his Bride,

But saving ane Crown,

He had naithing beside,

To make that Crown a Pound, my Jamie gang'd to Sea,

And the Crown and the Pound were all for me."

Her grief for this Separation is expressed very

pathetically.

"The ship was a Wrack,

Why did na Jennie die;

O why was I spared

To cry, Wae is me!"

There is no Doubt but that honest Jamie had still so

much Love for her as to Pity her in his Heart, tho' he

might, at the same time, be not a little angry with

her.

Towards the Conclusion, we must change the Persons, and

let Jamie be old England, Jennie, America, and old

Robin Gray, the Kingdom of France. Then honest Jenie,

having made a Treaty of Marriage with Gray, expresses

her firm Resolution of Fidelity, in a manner that does

Honour to her good Sense, and her Virtue.

"I may not think of Jamie,

For that would be a Sin,

But I maun do my best,

A gude wife to be;

For auld Robin Gray

Is very kind to me."

How was it possible for Hartley to remain angry with a man like this, even

if he was told by him in another letter that, though there could be but few

things, in which he would venture to disobey the orders of Congress, he

would, nevertheless, instantly renounce the commission that he held from

it, and banish himself forever from so infamous a country as America, if

Congress were to instruct him to seek a truce of ten years with Great

Britain, with the stipulation that America was not to assist France during

that time, if the war between Great Britain and France continued? This was

trying, though not so trying perhaps as his statement in still another

letter to Hartley that he thought of his reasonings to show that, if France

should require of America something unreasonable, America would not be

obliged by the treaty between them to continue the war as her ally, what

he supposed an honest woman would think, if a gallant should entertain her

with suppositions of cases in which infidelity to her husband would be

justifiable. Nor was the merry adaptation of the ballad of _Auld Robin

Gray_ the only thing of the kind that tended to relieve the tension of the

reproaches heaped by Franklin upon Great Britain in his letters to Hartley.

In the same letter, in which he depicts the King as thirsty for still

further draughts of American blood, and repels with apparently hot wrath

the suggestion of Hartley that the alliance between France and America was

the greatest stumbling-block in the way of peace between Great Britain and

France, he tells Hartley that the proposition to separate France and

America puts him in mind of the comic farce entitled _God-send, or The

Wreckers_. It was not hard, of course, for him to be put in mind of

something conceived by his own mind. The farce opens with this stage

introduction: (A Ship riding at anchor in a great Storm. A Lee Shore full

of Rocks, and lin'd with people, furnish'd with Axes & Carriages to cut up

Wrecks, knock the Sailors on the Head, and carry off the Plunder; according

to Custom.) Then, after a lively dialogue between the wreckers, who have

grown impatient with the staunch way in which the ship is riding out the

storm, they put off in a boat in the hope of luring her to the shore, and

come under her stern, and try to persuade her captain, in the course of

another lively dialogue, that his cable is a damned rotten French cable,

and will part of itself in half an hour; only to be told by the captain

that they are rogues, and offer nothing but treachery and mischief, and

that his cable is good and strong, and would hold long enough to balk their

projects. The dialogue ends with the exclamation by the spokesman of the

wreckers, "Come, my Lads, let's be gone. This Fellow is not so great a Fool

as we took him to be."

Familiar affection glistens in every line of the letters from Franklin to

George Whatley, and one of them is suffused with the genial warmth of his

best social hours. After some strictures on an epitaph by Pope, he said in

this letter:

I like better the concluding Sentiment in the old Song,

call'd _The Old Man's Wish_, wherein, after wishing for

a warm house in a country Town, an easy Horse, some

good old authors, ingenious and cheerful Companions, a

Pudding on Sundays, with stout Ale, and a bottle of

Burgundy, &c., &c., in separate Stanzas, each ending

with this burthen,

"May I govern my Passions with an absolute sway,

Grow wiser and better as my Strength wears away,

Without Gout or Stone, by a gentle Decay";

he adds,

"With a courage undaunted may I face my last day,

And, when I am gone, may the better Sort say,

'In the Morning when Sober, in the Evening when mellow,

He's gone, and has not left behind him his Fellow;

For he governed his Passions, &c.'"

But what signifies our Wishing? Things happen, after

all, as they will happen. I have sung that _wishing

Song_ a thousand times, when I was young, and now find,

at Four-score, that the three Contraries have befallen

me, being subject to the Gout and the Stone, and not

being yet Master of all my Passions. Like the proud

Girl in my Country, who wished and resolv'd not to

marry a Parson, nor a Presbyterian, nor an Irishman;

and at length found herself married to an Irish

Presbyterian Parson.

In the course of one of the summer rambles, which he took every year for

twenty years, for health and recreation, Franklin twice visited Scotland,

once in 1759, and once in 1771. As the result of civilities received by him

in that country at the hands of Sir Alexander Dick, the President of the

College of Physicians at Edinburgh, and Henry Home, Lord Kames, a Judge of

the Court of Session, and author of _The Elements of Criticism_ and _The

Sketches of the History of Man_, he became a fast friend of these two

eminent men. After completing with his son a tour of nearly 1500 miles in

1759, he wrote to Sir Alexander Dick, whose guests they had been for a

time, that the many civilities, favors and kindnesses heaped upon them,

while they were in Scotland, had made the most lasting impression upon

their minds, and endeared that country to them beyond expression. In the

same letter, he asked Sir Alexander to assure Lady Dick that he had great

faith in her parting prayers that the purse she honored him with would

never be quite empty. His letters to Lord Kames testified in even stronger

terms to the happy hours that he had spent in Scotland on this visit.

How unfortunate I was [he wrote to him] that I did not

press you and Lady Kames more strongly to favor us with

your company farther. How much more agreeable would our

journey have been, if we could have enjoyed you as far

as York. We could have beguiled the way, by discoursing

of a thousand things, that now we may never have an

opportunity of considering together; for conversation

warms the mind, enlivens the imagination, and is

continually starting fresh game, that is immediately

pursued and taken, and which would never have occurred

in the duller intercourse of epistolary correspondence.

So that whenever I reflect on the great pleasure and

advantage I received from the free communication of

sentiment, in the conversations we had at Kames, and in

the agreeable little rides to the Tweed side, I shall

forever regret our premature parting.

Even more fervid was the conclusion of this letter:

Our conversation till we came to York, was chiefly a

recollection of what we had seen and heard, the

pleasure we had enjoyed, and the kindness we had

received in Scotland, and how far that country had

exceeded our expectations. On the whole, I must say, I

think the time we spent there, was six weeks of the

_densest_ happiness I have met with in any part of my

life: and the agreeable and instructive society we

found there in such plenty, has left so pleasing an

impression on my memory, that did not strong connexions

draw me elsewhere, I believe Scotland would be the

country I should choose to spend the remainder of my

days in.

In a later letter to Lord Kames, he returns to the same pleasing field of

association.

Your invitation to make another jaunt to Scotland, and

offer to meet us half way _en famille_, was extremely

obliging. Certainly I never spent my time anywhere more

agreeably, nor have I been in any place, where the

inhabitants and their conversation left such lastingly

pleasing impressions on my mind, accompanied with the

strongest inclination once more to visit that

hospitable, friendly, and sensible people.

When we recall Franklin's distaste for theology and metaphysics, the humor

that ever lurked about his lips, and Sydney Smith's famous observation that

it requires a surgical operation to get a joke into a Scotchman's head, we

may well experience a sensation of momentary surprise when we read these

earnest tributes to the charm of Scotch social conditions in 1759--a sense

of surprise increased by the fact that, in the _Autobiography_, Franklin

ends a little dissertation on the odious nature of disputation with these

words: "Persons of good sense, I have since observed, seldom fall into it,

except lawyers, university men, and men of all sorts that have been bred at

Edinborough." But all such sensations of surprise pass away when we

remember that manly simplicity, practical sagacity, a spirit of enterprise

and a love of learning, which no discouragements can chill, were also

Scotch characteristics that Franklin shared with Scotchmen.

When Franklin returned in 1771 to the "odious-smells, barbarous sounds, bad

suppers, excellent hearts and most enlightened understandings," amid which

Sydney Smith, with his exaggerated humor, afterwards pictured himself as

dwelling when he was a resident of Edinburgh, William Franklin did not

accompany him.

In Scotland [Franklin wrote to his son after this

second visit] I spent 5 Days with Lord Kaims at his

Seat, Blair Drummond near Stirling, two or three Days

at Glasgow, two Days at Carron Iron Works, and the rest

of the Month in and about Edinburgh, lodging at David

Hume's, who entertain'd me with the greatest Kindness

and Hospitality, as did Lord Kaims & his Lady. All our

old Acquaintance there, Sir Alex'r Dick and Lady, Mr.

McGowan, Drs. Robertson, Cullen, Black, Ferguson,

Russel, and others, enquired affectionately of your

Welfare. I was out three Months, and the Journey was

evidently of great service to my Health.

The letters from Franklin to Lord Kames cover a great variety of topics;

and to his observations on some of these topics, which were of a political

or scientific nature, we shall return in other connections. One letter was

written, when Franklin was on the eve of sailing from Portsmouth to America

in 1762, and that the moment of embarkation upon the perilous seas of that

time was a solemn one is manifest enough in its opening statements:

MY DEAR LORD,

I am now waiting here only for a wind to waft me to

America, but cannot leave this happy island and my

friends in it, without extreme regret, though I am

going to a country and a people that I love. I am going

from the old world to the new; and I fancy I feel like

those, who are leaving this world for the next: grief

at the parting; fear of the passage; hope of the

future.

But never were votive chaplets woven and gratefully suspended by a voyager

after a more prosperous passage than this. Franklin left England in

company with ten sail of merchant ships, under the convoy of a man-of-war,

touched at the heavenly Madeira Islands, and was then caught up in the

benign trade winds, and borne safely to the American coast.

The weather was so favourable [he stated in another

letter to Lord Kames] that there were few days in which

we could not visit from ship to ship, dining with each

other, and on board of the man-of-war; which made the

time pass agreeably, much more so than when one goes in

a single ship; for this was like travelling in a moving

village, with all one's neighbours about one.

Among the things upon which Franklin prided himself was the fact that he

shaved himself, and in one of his letters to Lord Kames this trivial

circumstance is brought to our notice in these wise words:

I have long been of an opinion similar to that you

express, and think happiness consists more in small

conveniences or pleasures that occur every day, than in

great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom to

a man in the course of his life. Thus I reckon it among

my felicities, that I can set my own razor, and shave

myself perfectly well; in which I have a daily

pleasure, and avoid the uneasiness one is sometimes

obliged to suffer from the dirty fingers or bad breath

of a slovenly barber.

There was also a link of friendship between Franklin and David Hume. In a

letter to Strahan, Franklin, when on his visit to Scotland in 1771, writes

to him that Hume, agreeably to the precepts of the Gospel, had received the

stranger, and that he was then living with him at his house in the New Town

at Edinburgh most happily. In another letter, a week or so later, he

informed Strahan, after a short excursion from Edinburgh, that he was well

and again under the hospitable roof of the good Samaritan. Hume was too

much of a bigoted Tory not to snarl a little at Franklin's "factious"

spirit, when the Revolution was coming on, but, when Franklin was leaving

England in 1762, he paid him this handsome compliment:

I am very sorry, that you intend soon to leave our

hemisphere. America has sent us many good things, gold,

silver, sugar, indigo, &c; but you are the first

philosopher, and indeed the first great man of letters

for whom we are beholden to her. It is our own fault,

that we have not kept him; whence it appears, that we

do not agree with Solomon, that wisdom is above gold;

for we take care never to send back an ounce of the

latter, which we once lay our fingers upon.

It was a dangerous thing to enter into a competition of compliments with

Franklin, as his reply to this letter showed.

Your compliment of _gold_ and _wisdom_ [he said] is

very obliging to me, but a little injurious to your

country. The various value of everything in every part

of this world arises, you know, from the various

proportions of the quantity to the demand. We are told,

that gold and silver in Solomon's time were so plenty,

as to be of no more value in his country than the

stones in the street. You have here at present just

such a plenty of wisdom. Your people are, therefore,

not to be censured for desiring no more among them than

they have; and if I have _any_, I should certainly

carry it where, from its scarcity, it may probably come

to a better market.

This was certainly a ponderous compliment, but it does not seem quite so

much so, when read after the alleviating story which immediately preceded

it. Referring to a ridiculous dispute, mentioned by his correspondent, he

said:

Judges in their decisions often use precedents. I have

somewhere met with one, that is what the lawyers call a

_case in point_. The Church people and the Puritans in

a country town had once a bitter contention concerning

the erecting of a Maypole, which the former desired and

the latter opposed. Each party endeavoured to

strengthen itself by obtaining the authority of the

mayor, directing or forbidding a Maypole. He heard

their altercation with great patience, and then gravely

determined thus; "You, that are for having no Maypole,

shall have no Maypole; and you, that are for having a

Maypole, shall have a Maypole. Get about your business,

and let me hear no more of this quarrel."

Other Scotch friends of Franklin were William Alexander, a connection of

Lord Stirling, and his two daughters, one of whom, Mariamne, became the

wife of Franklin's nephew, Jonathan Williams. A letter from Alexander to

Franklin has its value because of the knowledge that it affords to us of

the personal bearing of Arthur Lee who was, we shall see, jealous, haughty

and sensitive enough to curdle even the sweet milk of Franklin's amiable

nature. "I see," wrote Alexander, "you have made my old friend Lee a

minister at Madrid, I think he has very much the manners of a Spaniard when

he is not angry." It was Alexander also whose careful mercantile habits

impelled him to write to Franklin, when he observed the disorder in which

the latter kept his papers at Passy, this word of caution:

Will you forgive me my Dear Sir for noticing, that your

Papers seem to me to lye a little loosely about your

hands--you are to consider yourself as surrounded by

spies and amongst people who can make a cable from a

thread; would not a spare half hour per day enable your

son to arrange all your papers, useless or not, so that

you could come at them sooner, and not one be visible

to a prying eye.

The only intimate friend, we believe, that Franklin had in Ireland was Sir

Edward Newenham, a member of the Irish Parliament, whose sympathy with the

American cause was so extreme that he appeared in his seat in deep

mourning when the news of General Montgomery's death reached Ireland.

Unfortunately, of the many letters, that Franklin wrote to him, only two or

three, of comparatively meagre interest, survive. But of Ireland itself we

have some graphic details in his letters to other persons. In one to Thomas

Cushing, he says of the Irish, after a tour of the island with his friend,

Richard Jackson, "There are many brave Spirits among them. The Gentry are a

very sensible, polite, friendly and handsome People. Their Parliament makes

a most respectable Figure, with a number of very good Speakers in both

Parties, and able Men of Business." He then tells Cushing in modest terms

how, when he was on his way to the gallery in the Parliament House at

Dublin, the whole assembly, upon being informed by the Speaker that there

was in town an American gentleman of distinguished character and merit, who

was a member or delegate of some of the Parliaments in America, by a loud,

unanimous expression of its will voted to admit him to the privileges of

the floor; whereupon two members came to him without the bar, where he was

standing, led him in and placed him very honorably.

Other friends of Franklin there were whom it is difficult to classify

either as Englishmen or Americans, such as General Horatio Gates and

General Charles Lee, who were born in England but became celebrated in

America, and Benjamin West, the painter, who was born in America, but

passed his mature life in England. That Franklin was on very friendly

relations with Gates there can be no doubt, for in one of his letters to

him he calls him his "Dear old friend," and that was a term never applied

by him to any but his intimates. Nor can there be much doubt as to what it

was that brought and kept Franklin and Gates together as friends. It was

the game to which Franklin was so much addicted that he even expounded its

morals in an essay--chess. "When," he wrote to Gates from Passy, "shall we

meet again in cheerful converse, talk over our adventures, and finish with

a quiet game of chess?" And on the same day that he addressed to Washington

the noble letter, declaring that, if the latter were to come to Europe, he

would know and enjoy what posterity would say of Washington, he wrote to

Gates, "May God give us soon a good Peace, and bring you and I (_sic_)

together again over a Chess board, where we may have Battles without

Bloodshed."

How an eccentric and perfidious man like General Charles Lee, whose temper

alone was so repugnant to Franklin's dislike of disputation as to win for

him the nickname of "Boiling Water" from the Indians, could ever have

passed himself off with Franklin as genuine coin is hard to understand, but

he appears to have done so. "Yours most affectionately," is the manner in

which one of Franklin's letters to him ends. In another letter to Lee,

Franklin gravely sums up in formal numerical sequence his reasons for

thinking that bows and arrows were good weapons not wisely laid aside. The

idea is one so little in harmony with his practical turn of mind, and is

reasoned out so elaborately, that we form a shrewd suspicion as we read

that this was after all but his humorous way of replying to his erratic

friend's suggestion that the use of pikes by the American Army might not be

a bad thing.

A very different kind of friend was Benjamin West. It was he that Franklin

had in mind when he wrote to Polly Stevenson in 1763, "After the first

Cares for the Necessaries of Life are over, we shall come to think of the

Embellishments. Already some of our young Geniuses begin to lisp Attempts

at Painting, Poetry, and Musick. We have a young Painter now studying at

Rome." Twenty years later, the lisping attempts of America at painting had

become so distinctly articulate, and the young painter, who was studying

at Rome, had become so famous, that Franklin could write to Jan Ingenhousz,

"In England at present, the best History Painter, West; the best Portrait

Painter, Copley, and the best Landscape Painter, Taylor, at Bath, are all

Americans." Benjamin West, and his wife, as Elizabeth Shewell, were friends

of Franklin and Deborah before West left his native Pennsylvania for

Europe; and the friendship between the artist and his wife and Franklin was

kept alive by affectionate intercourse in England. For one of West's sons

Franklin became godfather. "It gave me great Pleasure," he said in a letter

to West, referring to a letter from West to him, "as it informed me of the

Welfare of a Family I so much esteem and love, and that my Godson is a

promising Boy." The letter concludes with loving words for the godson and

Raphael, West's oldest son, and "Betsey," West's wife.

We have by no means taken a complete census of Franklin's American and

British friends. For instance, in a letter to Doctor Cooper from London, he

refers to a Mr. Mead, first Commissioner of the Customs in England, whom we

have not mentioned, as a particular and intimate friend of his; to say

nothing of other persons with whom his intercourse was very friendly but

either too colorless to arrest our attention in reading his correspondence,

or to even bring them up in his correspondence at all. But we have

marshalled quite enough of these friends before the eye of the reader, we

are sure, to satisfy him that few human beings ever had such a wealth of

affection heaped on them as Franklin.

FOOTNOTES:

[34] "Mrs. Shipley and her daughter Kitty, in their passion for you rival

Georgiana." Letter from Jonathan Shipley to Franklin, Nov. 27, 1785.

[35] To a series of experiments, conducted by Sir John Pringle, we owe our

knowledge of the fact that mosquito hawks are so whimsically constituted

that they live longer with their heads off than on. One of these

decapitated moths was so tenacious of his existence as to survive for 174

days.

[36] A letter from Franklin to Francis Maseres, dated Passy, June 26, 1785,

suggests an additional reason why the antipathy of the American Whigs to

the American loyalists was so unrelenting. "The war against us was begun by

a general act of Parliament, declaring all our estates confiscated; and

probably one great motive to the loyalty of the royalists was the hope of

sharing in these confiscations. They have played a deep game, staking their

estates against ours; and they have been unsuccessful. But it is a surer

game, since they had promises to rely on from your government, of

indemnification in case of loss; and I see your Parliament is about to

fulfil those Promises. To this I have no objection, because, though still

our enemies, they are men; they are in necessity; and I think even a hired

assassin has a right to his pay from his employer."

[37] The business of Whitefoord as a wine-merchant was carried on at No. 8

Craven Street, and he enjoyed a considerable reputation for wit in his

time. He served as Secretary to the Commission that settled the terms of

peace with the United States. He was, Burke thought, a mere _diseur de bons

mots_. Goldsmith deemed him of sufficient importance to make him the

subject of an epitaph intended to be worked into the Retaliation, and

reading as follows:

"Here Whitefoord reclines, deny it who can;

Tho' he merrily lived, he is now a grave man.

What pity, alas! that so lib'ral a mind

Should so long be to Newspaper Essays confined!

Who perhaps to the summit of science might soar,

Yet content if the table he set in a roar;

Whose talents to fit any station were fit,

Yet happy if Woodfall confessed him a wit."

His intimacy with Franklin, Whitefoord said on one occasion, had been the

"pride and happiness" of his life.