Chapter VI: Franklin's British Friends (4)

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.