Volume I Part 19 (1/2)
Greene: ”Among the felicities of my life I reckon your friends.h.i.+p, which I shall remember with pleasure as long as that life lasts.” And, in the meantime, he had given Mrs. Greene the proof of affectionate interest which, of all others, perhaps, is most endearing in a friend; that is he had taken her children as well as herself to his heart. After a brief visit with Sally to the Greenes in 1763, he wrote to Mrs. Greene, ”My Compliments too to Mr. Merchant and Miss Ward if they are still with you; and kiss the Babies for me. Sally says, & _for me too_.” This letter ends, ”With perfect Esteem & Regard, I am, Dear Katy (I can't yet alter my Stile to Madam) your affectionate friend.” In another letter to Mrs. Greene, about a month later, he says, ”My best respects to good Mr. Greene, Mrs. Ray, and love to your little ones. I am glad to hear they are well, and that your Celia goes alone.” The last two letters mentioned by us were written from Boston.
Franklin's next letter to Mrs. Greene was written from Philadelphia, condoles with her on the death of her mother, tells her that his dame sends her love to her with her thanks for the care that she had taken of her old man, and conveys his love to ”the little dear creatures.” ”We are all glad to hear of Ray, for we all love him,” he wrote to Mrs. Greene from Paris.
In the same letter, he said, ”I live here in great Respect, and dine every day with great folks; but I still long for home & for Repose; and should be happy to eat Indian Pudding in your Company & under your hospitable Roof.”
Hardly had he arrived in America on his return from France before he sent this affectionate message to Mrs. Greene and her husband: ”I seize this first Opportunity of acquainting my dear Friends, that I have once more the great Happiness of being at home in my own Country, and with my Family, because I know it will give you Pleasure.” As for Mrs. Greene, Jane Mecom informed him that, when she heard of his arrival, she was so overjoyed that her children thought she was afflicted with hysteria.
The friends.h.i.+p which existed between Franklin and the Greenes also existed between them and his sister Jane, who was a welcome guest under their roof.
”I pity my poor old Sister, to be so hara.s.sed & driven about by the enemy,”
he wrote to Mrs. Greene from Paris in 1778, ”For I feel a little myself the Inconvenience of being driven about by my friends.”
FOOTNOTES:
[29] The death of John Laurens in an obscure skirmish, almost at the very end of the Revolutionary War, after a brief career, distinguished by rare intellectual promise and daring valor is one of the most painful tragedies of that war. ”He had not a fault that I could discover,” Was.h.i.+ngton said of him, ”unless it were intrepidity bordering on rashness.”
[30] It may be said of the fame of Was.h.i.+ngton in his own land, with something like approximate accuracy, that a file of wild geese winging its flight along the Atlantic Seaboard from Maine to the alluvial meadows of the Roanoke in Southern Virginia, is, for but brief periods only out of sight of some statue or monument erected in his honor by his grateful countrymen. The fame of Franklin in America is but little less strikingly attested. As long ago as 1864, Parton could say this of it: ”As there are few counties in the Union which have not a town named Franklin, so there are few towns of any magnitude, which do not possess a Franklin Street, or a Franklin Square, a Franklin hotel, a Franklin bank, a Franklin fire-engine, a Franklin Lyceum, a Franklin lodge, or a Franklin charitable a.s.sociation. His bust and his portrait are only less universal than those of Was.h.i.+ngton, and most large cities contain something of the nature of a monument to Franklin.” How little this fame has died down since these words were written was seen in the pomp and splendor with which the second centenary of the birth of Franklin was celebrated in the United States and France in 1906.
[31] Another story of Franklin's told by Jefferson is good enough at any rate for a footnote. At parties at the French Court he sometimes had a game of chess with the old d.u.c.h.ess of Bourbon. Happening once to put her king into prize, he took it. ”Ah,” said she, ”we do not take kings so.” ”We do in America,” said he.
[32] It may be said of Ralph that few names are surer of immortality than his, though not for the reasons upon which he founded his deceitful hopes.
Between the _Autobiography_ and the _Dunciad_ he is, not unlike a mummy, preserved long beyond the date at which, in the ordinary course of things, he would have been overtaken by oblivion. This is one of the couplets that Pope bestowed upon him in the _Dunciad_:
”Silence, ye Wolves! While Ralph to Cynthia howls, And makes night hideous--answer him, ye owls.”
The couplet was accompanied by a still more venomous sting in prose: ”James Ralph, a name inserted after the first editions, not known till he writ a swearing-piece called _Sawney_, very abusive of Dr. Swift, Mr. Gay, and myself. These lines allude to a thing of his ent.i.tled _Night_, a poem. This low writer attended his own works with panegyrics in the Journals, and once in particular praised himself highly above Mr. Addison, in wretched remarks upon that author's account of English poets, printed in a London Journal, September, 1728. He was wholly illiterate and knew no language, not even French. Being advised to read the rules of dramatic poetry before he began a play, he smiled and replied 'Shakspeare writ without rules.' He ended at last in the common sink of all such writers, a political newspaper, to which he was recommended by his friend Arnal, and received a small pittance for pay; and being detected in writing on both sides on one and the same day, he publicly justified the morality of his conduct.” Another couplet of the _Dunciad_ is this:
”And see! the very Gazetteers give o'er, Ev'n Ralph repents, and Henley writes no more.”
[33] ”The s.h.i.+p Ohio still aground,” is the manner in which Franklin communicated on one occasion to Galloway the slow progress that the application for the Ohio grant was making.
CHAPTER VI
Franklin's British Friends
In Great Britain, Franklin had almost as many friends as in America. During his missions to England, he resided at No. 7 Craven Street, London, the home of Mrs. Margaret Stevenson, a widow, and the mother of ”Polly,” whose filial relations to him const.i.tuted an idyll in his life. Into all the interests and feelings of this home, he entered almost as fully and sympathetically as he did into those of his own home in Philadelphia; as is charmingly attested by his Craven Street _Gazette_. Mrs. Stevenson looked after his clothing, attended to him when he was sick, and made the purchases from time to time that the commissions of Deborah and Jane Mecom called for. In one of his letters to Temple, written after his return from his second mission to England, Franklin mentions a long letter that he had received from her in the form of ”a kind of Journal for a Month after our Departure, written on different Days, & of different Dates, acquainting me who has call'd, and what is done, with all the small News. In four or five Places, she sends her Love to her dear Boy, hopes he was not very sick at Sea, &c., &c.” This journal doubtless set forth in a matter-of-fact way the daily life of the Craven Street household, which Franklin idealized with such captivating vivacity in the humorous pages of the Craven Street _Gazette_. At the Craven Street house, he and his son lived in great comfort, occupying four rooms, and waited upon by his man-servant, and Billy's negro attendant; and, when he moved about the streets of London, it was in a modest chariot of his own. Franklin's letters to Deborah frequently conveyed affectionate messages from Mrs. Stevenson and Polly to Deborah and her daughter Sally. Occasionally, too, presents of one kind or another from Mrs. Stevenson found their way across the Atlantic to Deborah and Sally. Altogether, the Craven Street house, if not a true home to Franklin in every sense of the word, was a cheerful semblance of one. A letter from Dr. Priestley to him, which he received shortly after his return from Canada, during the American Revolution, bears witness to the impression left by his amiable traits upon the memory of the good woman with whom he had resided so long. After telling Franklin that Franklin's old servant Fevre often mentioned him with affection and respect, Dr.
Priestley added, ”Mrs. Stevenson is much as usual. She can talk about nothing but you.” The feeling was fully returned.
It is always with great Pleasure [he wrote to her from Pa.s.sy], when I think of our long continu'd Friends.h.i.+p, which had not the least Interruption in the Course of Twenty Years (some of the happiest of my Life), that I spent under your Roof and in your Company. If I do not write to you as often as I us'd to do, when I happen'd to be absent from you, it is owing partly to the present Difficulty of sure Communication, and partly to an Apprehension of some possible Inconvenience, that my Correspondence might occasion you. Be a.s.sured, my dear Friend, that my Regard, Esteem, and Affection for you, are not in the least impair'd or diminish'd; and that, if Circ.u.mstances would permit, nothing would afford me so much Satisfaction, as to be with you in the same House, and to experience again your faithful, tender Care, and Attention to my Interests, Health, and Comfortable Living, which so long and steadily attach'd me to you, and which I shall ever remember with Grat.i.tude.
And, when the news of Mrs. Stevenson's death was communicated to Franklin by her daughter, the retrospect of the last twenty-five years that it opened up to him framed itself into these tender words in his reply.
During the greatest Part of the Time, I lived in the same House with my dear deceased Friend, your Mother; of course you and I saw and convers'd with each other much and often. It is to all our Honours, that in all that time we never had among us the smallest Misunderstanding. Our Friends.h.i.+p has been all clear Suns.h.i.+ne, without the least Cloud in its Hemisphere.
Let me conclude by saying to you, what I have had too frequent Occasions to say to my other remaining old Friends, ”The fewer we become, the more let us love one another.”
On the back of the last letter, dated July 24, 1782, that he received from Mrs. Stevenson, he indorsed this memorandum: ”This good woman, my dear Friend, died the first of January following. She was about my Age.”
But the closest friends.h.i.+p that Franklin formed in England was with Mary, or Polly, Stevenson. To her, perhaps, the most delightful of all his familiar letters were written--letters so full of love and watchful interest as to suggest a father rather than a friend. It is not too much to say that they are distinguished by a purity and tenderness of feeling almost perfect, and by a combination of delicate humor and instructive wisdom to which it would be hard to find a parallel. The first of them bears date May 4, 1759, and the last bears date May 30, 1786. That the letters, some forty-six in number, are not more numerous even than they are is due to the fact that, during the period of their intercourse, the two friends were often under the same roof, or, when they were not, saw each other frequently.