Benjamin Franklin; Self-Revealed Volume I Part 22

I lament with you most sincerely the unfortunate end of poor Mungo. Few squirrels were better accomplished; for he had had a good education, had travelled far, and seen much of the world. As he had the honor of being, for his virtues, your favourite, he should not go, like common skuggs, without an elegy or an epitaph. Let us give him one in the monumental style and measure, which, being neither prose nor verse, is perhaps the properest for grief; since to use common language would look as if we were not affected, and to make rhymes would seem trifling in sorrow.

EPITAPH

Alas! poor Mungo!

Happy wert thou, hadst thou known Thy own felicity.

Remote from the fierce bald eagle, Tyrant of thy native woods, Thou hadst nought to fear from his piercing talons, Nor from the murdering gun Of the thoughtless sportsman.

Safe in thy wired castle, GRIMALKIN never could annoy thee.

Daily wert thou fed with the choicest viands, By the fair hand of an indulgent mistress; But, discontented, Thou wouldst have more freedom.

Too soon, alas! didst thou obtain it; And wandering, Thou art fallen by the fangs of wanton, cruel Ranger!

Learn hence, Ye who blindly seek more liberty, Whether subjects, sons, squirrels or daughters, That apparent restraint may be real protection; Yielding peace and plenty With security.

You see, my dear Miss, how much more decent and proper this broken style is, than if we were to say, by way of epitaph,

Here SKUGG Lies snug, As a bug In a rug.

and yet, perhaps, there are people in the world of so little feeling as to think that this would be a good-enough epitaph for poor Mungo.

If you wish it, I shall procure another to succeed him; but perhaps you will now choose some other amus.e.m.e.nt.

Two of Georgiana's letters to Franklin, after his arrival in France, are very interesting, and one of them especially could not have been written by any but a highly gifted and accomplished woman. In this letter, the first of the two, she begins by expressing her joy at unexpectedly receiving a letter from him.

How good you were [she exclaimed] to send me your direction, but I fear I must not make use of it as often as I could wish, since my father says it will be prudent not to write in the present situation of affairs. I am not of an age to be so very prudent, and the only thought that occurred to me was your suspecting that my silence proceeded from other motives. I could not support the idea of your believing that I love and esteem you less than I did some few years ago. I therefore write this once without my father's knowledge. You are the first man that ever received a private letter from me, and in this instance I feel that my intentions justify my conduct; but I must entreat that you will take no notice of my writing, when next I have the happiness of hearing from you.

She then proceeds to tell Franklin all about her father, her mother, her sister Emily and Emily's daughter, "a charming little girl, near fifteen months old, whom her aunts reckon a prodigy of sense and beauty." The rest of her sisters, she said, continued in _statu quo_. Whether that proceeded from the men being difficult or from _their_ being difficult, she left him to determine.

His friends all loved him almost as much as she did; as much she would not admit to be possible. Dr. Pringle had made her extremely happy the preceding winter by giving her a print of her excellent friend, which, was certainly very like him, although it wanted the addition of his own hair to make it complete; but, as it was, she prized it infinitely, now that the dear original was absent. She then has a word to say about Smith's _Wealth of Nations_, Gibbon's _History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ and the _Economics_, which she had read with great attention, as indeed everything else she could meet with relative to Socrates; for she fancied she could discover in each trait of that admirable man's character a strong resemblance between him and her much-loved friend--the same clearness of judgment, the same uprightness of intention and the same superior understanding. Other words are bestowed on the account which Sir William Hamilton had lately given her of a new electrical machine invented in Italy, the happiness that she would enjoy, if Franklin were in England to explain it to her, and the envy excited in her by the opportunities that his grandson had for showing him kindness and attention. "Did my family,"

she further declares, "know of my writing, my letter would scarce contain the very many things they would desire me to say for them. They continue to admire and love you as much as they did formerly, nor can any time or event in the least change their sentiments."

She then concludes partly in French and partly in English in these words:

Adieu, mon cher Socrate; conservez-vous pour l'amour de moi, et pour mille autres raisons plus importants. Je ne vous en dirai pas d'advantage pour aujourd'hui, mais je veux esperer de vous entretenir plus a mon aise, avant que soit longue. Pray write whenever a safe conveyance opens, since the receiving letters is reckoned very different from answering them. I must once more repeat n.o.body knows of this scroll; "a word to the wise,"--as Poor Richard says.

In her second letter, Georgiana speaks of the difficulty she experienced in having her letters conveyed safely to Pa.s.sy. "Strange," she declared, "that I should be under the necessity of concealing from the world a correspondence which it is the pride and glory of my heart to maintain."

His _Dialogue with the Gout_, she said, was written with his own cheerful pleasantry, and _La belle et la mauvaise Jambe_ recalled to her mind those happy hours they once pa.s.sed in his society, where they were never amused without learning some useful truth, and where she first acquired a taste _pour la conversation badinante and reflechie_. Her father grew every year fonder of the peace of Twyford; having found his endeavors to serve his country ineffectual, he had yielded to a torrent which it was no longer in his power to control. Sir John Pringle (Franklin's friend) had left London and gone to reside in Scotland; she feared that he was much straitened in his circ.u.mstances; he looked ill and was vastly changed from what he remembered him; Dr. Priestley (another friend of Franklin) was then on a short visit to his friends in town; good Dr. Price (another friend of Franklin) called on them often, and gave them hopes of a visit to Twyford.

The letter also informed Franklin that the first opportunity that they had of sending a parcel to Paris he might expect _all_ their shades; and expressed her grat.i.tude to Mr. Jones for undertaking the care of her letter, and giving her an opportunity of a.s.suring Franklin how much she did and ever should continue to love him.

Catherine Ray was not far wrong when she spoke of Franklin as a conjurer.

Catherine s.h.i.+pley's letter to him, after she had parted with him at Southampton, though without the romantic flush of these two letters, spoke the same general language of deep-seated affection. She was quite provoked with herself, she said, when she got to Southampton that she had not thought of something, such as a pincus.h.i.+on, to leave with him, that might have been useful to him during the voyage to remind him of her. "Did you ever taste the ginger cake," she asked, "and think it had belonged to your fellow-traveller? In short, I want some excuse for asking whether you ever think about me." And from this letter it appears that he had a place in the hearts of Emily and Betsey too. She had had a letter from Emily, Catherine further said, the night after she got home, to inquire whether his stay at Southampton would allow time for her coming to see him. Betsey regretted much that she had lost that happiness, and the writer had written to dear Georgiana a long account of him, for she knew every circ.u.mstance would be interesting to her. "Indeed, my dear sir," the letter ended, "from my father and mother down to their _youngest child_, we all respect and love you."[34]

When Franklin was told by Georgiana that Sir John Pringle was pinched by poverty, and looked ill, he must have been sorely distressed; for Sir John he once described as his "steady, good friend." A pupil of Boerhaave, a high authority upon the application of sanitary science to the prevention of dysentery and hospital fevers, physician to the Queen, and President of the Royal Society, Dr. Pringle was one of the distinguished men of his time. What churchmen were to the preservation of cla.s.sical learning, before teaching became a special calling, physicians were to general scientific knowledge before science became such; and, among these physicians, he occupied an honorable position.[35] "His speech in giving the last medal, (of the Royal Society) on the subject of the discoveries relating to the air," Franklin wrote to Jan Ingenhousz, "did him great honour." He was quite unlike the courtiers who sought to convince King Canute that he could stay the incoming tide by his command, as George III. found out when he asked him, after the outbreak of the American Revolution, to p.r.o.nounce an opinion in favor of the subst.i.tution of blunt for pointed lightning rods on Kew Palace. The laws of nature, Sir John hinted, were not changeable at royal pleasure, but positions of honor and profit he soon learnt, if he did not know it before, were; for he fell into such disfavor with the King that he had to resign as President of the Royal Society, and was deprived of his post as physician to the Queen. The circ.u.mstances in which his disgrace originated leave us at but little loss to understand why the King should have become such a dogged partisan of blunt conductors. Prior to the Revolution, Franklin had been consulted by the British Board of Ordnance as to the best means of protecting the a.r.s.enals at Purfleet from lightning, and, after he had visited the powder magazine there, the Royal Society, too, was asked by the Board for its opinion. The Society accordingly appointed a committee of learned men, including Cavendish and Franklin, to make a report on the subject. All of the committee except Benjamin Wilson, who dissented, reported in favor of pointed conductors as against blunt ones, and Franklin, the inventor of pointed lightning rods, drew up the report. The scientific controversy that followed soon a.s.sumed a political character, when Franklin dropped the philosophical task of s.n.a.t.c.hing the lightning from the skies for the rebellious task of s.n.a.t.c.hing the sceptre from a tyrant. When he heard that George III. was, like Ajax, obstinate enough to defy even the lightning, he wrote to an unknown correspondent:

The King's changing his _pointed_ conductors for _blunt_ ones is, therefore, a matter of small importance to me. If I had a wish about it, it would be that he had rejected them altogether as ineffectual.

For it is only since he thought himself and family safe from the thunder of Heaven, that he dared to use his own thunder in destroying his innocent subjects.

Dr. Ingenhousz, however, was not so self-contained, and made such an angry attack on Wilson that Franklin, who invariably relied in such cases upon silence and the principle that Truth is a cat with nine lives to defend him, laughingly remarked, "He seems as much heated about this _one point_, as the Jansenists and Molinists were about the _five_." As for King George, he had at least the satisfaction of realizing that his people still had a ready fund of wit for timely use. One homely couplet of the period, referring to Franklin's famous kite, ran in this way:

"He with a kite drew lightning from the sky, And like a kite he pecked King George's eye."

Another more polished poet penned these neat lines:

"While you, great George, for knowledge hunt, And sharp conductors change for blunt, The Empire's out of joint.

Franklin another course pursues And all your thunder heedless views By keeping to the point."

If we may believe Franklin, Sir John held the efficacy of the healing art in very moderate esteem. The reader has already been told of the humorous manner in which he let it be known that, in his opinion, of the two cla.s.ses of pract.i.tioners, old women and regular physicians, the former had done the most to save the honor of the profession. Franklin also informed Dr. Rush that Sir John "once told him 92 fevers out of 100 cured themselves, 4 were cured by Art, and 4 proved fatal." But many people must have had a more favorable opinion of the professional value of Sir John than Sir John himself had, for his "Conversations" were in high repute. On this point, there is some evidence in a letter from Franklin to Dr. Thomas Bond, who was desirous of giving his son Richard the benefit of a foreign medical education. Referring to Sir John, Franklin wrote:

Every Wednesday Evening he admits young Physicians and Surgeons to a Conversation at his House, which is thought very improving to them. I will endeavour to introduce your Son there when he comes to London. And to tell you frankly my Opinion, I suspect there is more valuable knowledge in Physic to be learnt from the honest candid Observations of an old Pract.i.tioner, who is past all desire of more Business, having made his Fortune, who has none of the Professional Interest in keeping up a Parade of Science to draw Pupils, and who by Experience has discovered the Inefficacy of most Remedies and Modes of Practice, than from all the formal Lectures of all the Universities upon Earth.

That Dr. John cured at least one patient, we are told by Dr. Rush on the authority of Franklin, but it was Only himself of a tremor, and that by simply ceasing to take snuff. Dr. Pringle and himself, Franklin told Dr.

Rush, observed that tremors of the hands were more frequent in France than elsewhere, and probably from the excessive use of snuff. "He concluded,"

says Dr. Rush, "that there was no great advantage in using tobacco in any way, for that he had kept company with persons who used it all his life, and no one had ever advised him to use it. The Doctor in the 81st year of his age declared he had never snuffed, chewed, or smoked."

Among the persons who sought Sir John's professional advice was Franklin himself. It was in relation to a cutaneous trouble which vexed him for some fourteen years, and broke out afresh when he was in his eighty-third year.

But the best medicine that Franklin ever obtained from Sir John was his companions.h.i.+p upon two continental tours, one of which was inspired by the latter's desire to drink the waters at Pyrmont, and the other by the attractions of the French capital. When the news of Sir John's death reached Franklin at Pa.s.sy he paid the usual heartfelt tribute. "We have lost our common Friend," he wrote to Jan Ingenhousz, "the excellent Pringle. How many pleasing hours you and I have pa.s.s'd together in his Company!"

Another English physician, for whom Franklin entertained a feeling of deep affection, was the Quaker Dr. John Fothergill. After the death of this friend, in a letter to Dr. John Coakley Lettsom, still another friend of his, and one of the famous English physicians of the eighteenth century, he expressed this extraordinary opinion of Dr. Fothergill's worth: "If we may estimate the goodness of a man by his disposition to do good, and his constant endeavours and success in doing it, I can hardly conceive that a better man has ever existed." No faint praise to be uttered by the founder of the Junto and one who valued above all things the character of a doer of good! Like Sir John Pringle, Dr. Fothergill belonged to the cla.s.s of physicians who pursued medicine, as if it were a mistress not to be wooed except with the favor of the other members of the scientific sisterhood. He was an ardent botanist, and his collection of botanical specimens and paintings on vellum of rare plants was among the remarkable collections of his age. Two of his correspondents were the Pennsylvania botanists, John Bartram and Humphrey Marshall, who brought to his knowledge a flora in many s.h.i.+ning instances unknown to the woods and fields of the Old World.

His medical writings were held in high esteem, and were published after his death under the editorial supervision of Dr. Lettsom.

As a pract.i.tioner, he was eminently successful, and numbered among his patients many representatives of the most powerful and exclusive circles in London. What the extent of his practice was we can infer from a question put to him by Franklin in 1764.

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, a.s.sist 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 a.s.siduity. 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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.sisted by the Doctor in his effort to secure a settlement of the dispute over taxation between the Pennsylvania a.s.sembly 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 inst.i.tution 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 munic.i.p.al 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 friends.h.i.+p, 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 p.r.o.nounced. 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sist 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.