Volume I Part 17 (2/2)
The Verses at the bottom [he wrote] are truly extravagant. But you must know, that the Desire of pleasing, by a perpetual rise of Compliments in this polite Nation, has so us'd up all the common Expressions of Approbation, that they are become flat and insipid, and to use them almost implies Censure.
Hence Musick, that formerly might be sufficiently prais'd when it was called _bonne_, to go a little farther they call'd it _excellente_, _then superbe_, _magnifique_, _exquise_, celeste, all which being in their turns worn out, there only remains _divine_; and, when that is grown as insignificant as its Predecessors, I think they must return to common Speech and common Sense; as from vying with one another in fine and costly Paintings on their Coaches, since I first knew the Country, not being able to go farther in that Way, they have returned lately to plain Carriages, painted without Arms or Figures, in one uniform Colour.
In a subsequent letter, Franklin informs Jay that, through the a.s.sistance of the French Court, he is in a position to honor the drafts of Jay to the extent of $25,000. ”If you find any Inclination to hug me for the good News of this Letter,” he concluded, ”I const.i.tute and appoint Mrs. Jay my Attorney, to receive in my Behalf your embraces.”
Afterwards Jay was appointed one of our Commissioners to negotiate the treaty of peace with Great Britain, and he and his family settled down under the same roof with Franklin at Pa.s.sy. The result was a mutual feeling of attachment, so strong that when Jay returned to America Franklin could write to him of a kind letter that he had received from him: ”It gave me Pleasure on two Accounts; as it inform'd me of the public Welfare, and that of your, I may almost say _our_ dear little Family; for, since I had the Pleasure of their being with me in the same House, I have ever felt a tender Affection for them, equal I believe to that of most Fathers.” In other letters to Jay, there are repeated references by Franklin to the child of Jay mentioned above whose singular attachment to him, he said, he would always remember. ”Embrace my little Friend for me,” he wrote to Jay and his wife, when he was wis.h.i.+ng them a prosperous return voyage to America, and, in a later letter, after his own return to America, to the same pair, he said he was so well as to think it possible that he might once more have the pleasure of seeing them both at New York, with his dear young friend, who, he hoped, might not have quite forgotten him.
Beyond the Harlem River, his friends were only less numerous than they were in Pennsylvania. Among the most conspicuous were Josiah Quincy, John Winthrop, Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard College, and Dr. Samuel Cooper, the celebrated clergyman and patriot. We mention these three Boston friends of his first because they were feelingly grouped in a letter that he wrote to James Bowdoin, another valued Boston friend of his, towards the close of his life. In this letter, he tells Bowdoin that it had given him great pleasure to receive his kind letter, as it proved that all his friends in Boston were not estranged from him by the malevolent misrepresentations of his conduct that had been circulated there, but that one of the most esteemed still retained a regard for him.
”Indeed,” Franklin said, ”you are now almost the only one left me by nature; Death having, since we were last together, depriv'd me of my dear Cooper, Winthrop, and Quincy.” Winthrop, he had said, in an earlier letter to Dr. Cooper, was one of the old friends for the sake of whose society he wished to return from France and spend the small remnant of his days in New England. The friends.h.i.+p between Quincy and Franklin began when Franklin was a member of the Pennsylvania a.s.sembly, and had its origin in the sum of ten thousand pounds, which Quincy, as the agent of the Colony of Ma.s.sachusetts, obtained through the a.s.sistance of Franklin from the Colony of Pennsylvania for the military needs of the former colony. Quincy, Franklin said in the _Autobiography_, returned thanks to the a.s.sembly in a handsome memorial, went home highly pleased with the success of his emba.s.sy, and ever after bore for him the most cordial and affectionate friends.h.i.+p.
For Quincy's highly promising son, Josiah, who died at sea at the early age of thirty-five, Franklin formed a warm regard when Josiah came over to London during the second mission of Franklin to England. To the father he wrote of the son in terms that were doubtless deeply gratifying to him, and, in a letter to James Bowdoin, he said: ”I am much pleased with Mr.
Quincy. It is a thousand pities his strength of body is not equal to his strength of mind. His zeal for the public, like that of David for G.o.d's house, will, I fear, eat him up.” Later, when the younger Quincy's zeal had actually consumed him, Franklin wrote to the elder Quincy:
The epitaph on my dear and much esteemed young Friend, is too well written to be capable of Improvement by any Corrections of mine. Your Moderation appears in it, since the natural affection of a Parent has not induced you to exaggerate his Virtues. I shall always mourn his Loss with you; a Loss not easily made up to his Country.
And then, referring to some of the falsehoods in circulation about his own conduct as Commissioner, he exclaimed: ”How differently const.i.tuted was his n.o.ble and generous Mind from that of the miserable Calumniators you mention! Having Plenty of Merit in himself, he was not jealous of the Appearance of Merit in others, but did Justice to their Characters with as much Pleasure as these People do Injury.”
When he sat down at Saratoga to write to a few friends by way of farewell, fearing that the mission to Canada at his time of life would prove too much for him, Quincy was the first of his New England friends to whom he sent an adieu.
To Dr. Samuel Cooper, Franklin wrote some of the most valuable of all his political letters, but the correspondence between them is marked by few details of a personal or social nature. It was upon the recommendation of Franklin that the degree of Doctor of Divinity was conferred upon Cooper by the University of Edinburgh. ”The Part I took in the Application for your Degree,” he wrote to Dr. Cooper, ”was merely doing justice to Merit, which is the Duty of an honest Man whenever he has the Opportunity.” That Dr.
Cooper was duly grateful, we may infer, among other things, from a letter in which Franklin tells his sister Jane that he is obliged to good Dr.
Cooper for his prayers. That he was able to hold his own even with such a skilful dispenser of compliments as Franklin himself we may readily believe after reading the letter to Franklin in which he used these words: ”You once told me in a letter, as you were going to France, the public had had the eating your flesh and seemed resolved to pick your bones--we all agree the nearer the bone the sweeter the meat.” It was to Dr. Cooper that Franklin expressed the hope that America would never deserve the reproof administered to an enthusiastical knave in Pennsylvania, who, when asked by his creditor to give him a bond and pay him interest, replied:
No, I cannot do that; I cannot in conscience either receive or pay Interest, it is against my Principle.
You have then the Conscience of a Rogue, says the Creditor: You tell me it is against your Principle to pay Interest; and it being against your Interest to pay the Princ.i.p.al, I perceive you do not intend to pay me either one or t'other.
The letters of Franklin to James Bowdoin are full of interest, but the interest is scientific.
Another Boston friend of Franklin was Mather Byles. In a letter to him, Franklin expresses his pleasure at learning that the lives of Byles and his daughters had been protected by his ”points,” and his regret that electricity had not really proved what it was at first supposed to be--a cure for the palsy.
It is however happy for you [Franklin said], that, when Old Age and that Malady have concurr'd to infeeble you, and to disable you for Writing, you have a Daughter at hand to nurse you with filial Attention, and to be your Secretary, of which I see she is very capable, by the Elegance and Correctness of her Writing in the Letter I am now answering.
Other letters from Franklin to Byles have unhappily perished. This fact is brought to our knowledge by a letter from him to Elizabeth Partridge, which shows that even the famous letter to her, in which he spoke of the end of his brother as if he had gone off quietly from a party of pleasure in a sedan chair, led for a time a precarious existence. If this was the letter, he said, of which she desired a copy, he fancied that she might possibly find it in Boston, as Dr. Byles once wrote to him that many copies had been taken of it. Then follows this playful and characteristic touch. ”I too, should have been glad to have seen that again, among others I had written to him and you. But you inform me they were eaten by the Mice. Poor little innocent Creatures, I am sorry they had no better Food. But since they like my Letters, here is another Treat for them.”
Another Ma.s.sachusetts friend of Franklin was Samuel Danforth, the President of its Colonial Council. ”It gave me great pleasure,” Franklin wrote to this friend on one occasion, ”to receive so chearful an Epistle from a Friend of half a Century's Standing, and to see him commencing Life anew in so valuable a Son.” When this letter was written, Franklin was in his sixty-eighth year, but how far he was from being sated with the joy of living other pa.s.sages in it clearly manifest.
I hope [he said] for the great Pleasure of once more seeing and conversing with you: And tho' living-on in one's Children, as we both may do, is a good thing, I cannot but fancy it might be better to continue living ourselves at the same time. I rejoice, therefore, in your kind Intentions of including me in the Benefits of that inestimable Stone, which, curing all Diseases (even old Age itself) will enable us to see the future glorious state of our America, enjoying in full security her own Liberties, and offering in her Bosom a Partic.i.p.ation of them to all the oppress'd of other Nations. I antic.i.p.ate the jolly Conversation we and twenty more of our Friends may have 100 Years hence on this subject, over that well replenish'd Bowl at Cambridge Commencement.
In Connecticut, too, Franklin had some highly prized friends. Among them were Jared Eliot, the grandson of Apostle Eliot, and the author of an essay upon _Field Husbandry in New England_, Ezra Stiles, President of Yale College, Dr. Samuel Johnson and Jared Ingersoll. The letters from Franklin to Eliot are a charming _melange_ of what is now known as Popular Science and Agriculture. To Franklin there was philosophy even in the roasting of an egg, and for agriculture he had the partiality which no one, so close to all the pulsations of nature as he was, can fail to entertain. When he heard from his friend Mrs. Catherine Greene that her son Ray was ”smart in the farming way,” he wrote to her, ”I think agriculture the most honourable of all employments, being the most independent. The farmer has no need of popular favour, nor the favour of the great; the success of his crops depending only on the blessing of G.o.d upon his honest industry.” Franklin, of course, was writing before the day of the trust, the high protective tariff, the San Jose scale and the boll weevil.
In one letter to Eliot he gossips delightfully upon such diverse topics as the price of linseed oil, the kind of land on which Pennsylvania hemp was raised, the recent weather, northeast storms, the origin of springs, sea-sh.e.l.l strata and import duties. Something is also said in the letter about gra.s.s seed, and it is curious to note that apparently Franklin was not aware that in parts of New England timothy has always been known as herd's-gra.s.s. And this reminds us that he repeatedly in his later life protested against the use in New England of the word ”improve” in the sense of ”employ” as a barbarous innovation, when in point of fact the word had been used in that sense in a lampoon in the _Courant_, when that lively sheet was being published under his youthful management. In another letter, written probably in the year 1749, Franklin tells Eliot that he had purchased some eighteen months before about three hundred acres of land near Burlington, and was resolved to improve it in the best and speediest manner. ”My fortune, (thank G.o.d),” he said, ”is such that I can enjoy all the necessaries and many of the Indulgences of Life; but I think that in Duty to my children I ought so to manage, that the profits of my Farm may Balance the loss my Income will Suffer by my retreat to it.” He then proceeds to narrate to Eliot what he had done to secure this result; how he had scoured up the ditches and drains in one meadow, reduced it to an arable condition, and reaped a good crop of oat fodder from it, and how he had then immediately ploughed the meadow again and harrowed it, and sowed it with different kinds of gra.s.s seed. ”Take the whole together,” he said with decided satisfaction, ”it is well-matted, and looks like a green corn-field.” He next tells how he drained a round pond of twelve acres, and seeded the soil previously covered by it, too. Even in such modest operations as these the quick observation and precise standards of a man, who was perhaps first of all a man of science, are apparent. He noted that the red clover came up in four days and the herd's-gra.s.s in six days, that the herd's-gra.s.s was less sensitive to frost than the red clover, and that the thicker gra.s.s seed is sown the less injured by the frost the young gra.s.s is apt to be. By actual experiment, he found that a bushel of clean chaff of timothy or salem gra.s.s seed would yield five quarts of seed. In another letter to Eliot he has a word to say about the Schuyler copper mine in New Jersey (the only valuable copper mine in America that he knew of) which yielded good copper and turned out vast wealth to its owners. And then there is a ray from the splendor in which the lordly Schuylers lived in this bit of descriptive detail:
Col. John Schuyler, one of the owners, has a deer park five miles round, fenced with cedar logs, five logs high, with blocks of wood between. It contains a variety of land, high and low, woodland and clear.
There are a great many deer in it; and he expects in a few years to be able to kill two hundred head a year, which will be a very profitable thing. He has likewise six hundred acres of meadow, all within bank.
The fact that Col. John Schuyler had six hundred acres of meadow land within bank was not lost on Eliot; for later Franklin writes to him again promising to obtain from Colonel Schuyler a particular account of the method pursued by him in improving this land. ”In return,” said Franklin, ”(for you know there is no Trade without Returns) I request you to procure for me a particular Acct of the manner of making a new kind of Fence we saw at Southhold, on Long Island, which consists of a Bank and Hedge.” With the exact.i.tude of an experimental philosopher, he then details the precise particulars that he desired, disclosing in doing so the fact that Pennsylvania was beginning in many places to be at a loss for wood to fence with. This statement need not surprise the reader, for in his _Account of the New-Invented Pennsylvanian Fireplaces_, published some six years before, Franklin informs us that wood, at that time the common fuel, which could be formerly obtained at every man's door, had then to be fetched near one hundred miles to some towns, and made a very considerable article in the expense of families. From this same essay, we learn that it was deemed uncertain by Franklin whether ”Pit-Coal” would ever be discovered in Pennsylvania! In another letter from Franklin to Eliot, along with some items about Peter Collinson, ”a most benevolent, worthy man, very curious in botany and other branches of natural history, and fond of improvements in agriculture, &c.,” Hugh Roberts' high opinion of Eliot's ”Pieces,”
ditching, the Academy, barometers, thermometers and hygrometers, Franklin has some sprightly observations to make upon the love of praise. Rarely, we venture to say, have more winning arguments ever been urged for the reversal of the world's judgment upon any point.
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