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Their wise Debates in Writing to commit,
By which great Honour they did clearly shew,
To Write, as well as Print, he fully knew,
And what was still more Great, and worthy Note,
(It's said) they gave him too a Casting Vote.

But stop my Muse, and give thy Sorrows vent, Such Sorrows which in Hearts of Friends are pent, Search deep for Sighs and Groans in Nature's Store,

Then weep so long, till thou canst weep no more,
Next Summer all thy Strength, and others call,
To tell his Death, and solemn Funeral.

While on his Death-Bed, oft, Dear Lord, he cry'd,
He sang, and sweetly like a Lamb he dy'd.
His Corps attended was by Friends so soon
From Seven at Morn, till Öne a-clock at Noon,
By Master-Printers carried towards his Grave,
Our City Printer such an Honour gave.
A Worthy Merchant did the Widow lead,
And then both mounted on a stately steed,
Next Preachers, Common Council, Aldermen,
A Judge and Sheriff grac'd the solemn Train,
Nor fail'd our Treasurer, in respect to come,
Nor staid the Keeper of the ROLLS at home,
Our aged Post Master here now appears,
Who had not walked so far for twice Twelve Years,
With Merchants, Shopkeepers, the Young and Old,
A numerous Throng not very easy told,
The Keeper of the SEAL did on Him wait,
Thus was he carry'd like a King, in State,
And what still adds a further Lustre to't,
Some rode well mounted, others walk'd afoot,
Church-Folks, Dissenters, here with one Accord,
Their kind Attendance readily afford,

To shew their Love, each differing Sect agree
To grace his Fun'ral with their Company,
And what was yet more grateful, People cry'd
Belov'd he liv'd, See how belov'd he dy'd.

When to the crowded Meeting he was bore,
I wept so long till I could weep no more,
While beauteous LIGHTFOOT did, like Noah's
Dove,

Sweetly display God's Universal Love;

His Words like Balm (or Drops of Honey) laid,
To heal those Wounds Grief in my Heart had made.
Three other Preachers did their Task fulfil,
The Loving Chalkley and the Lowly Hill,
The famous Langdale did the Sermons end
For this our highly honour'd, worthy Friend.
And now with Joy, with holy joy we'll leave,
His Body resting in his peaceful Grave,
His Soul, in the blest Arms of ONE above,
Whose brightest Character is that of LOVE
A GOD that's slow to mark, what's done amiss!
Who would not serve so dear a God as this?

In whose kind, gracious lovely arms we'll leave
him;

For HE who bought him, has most Right to have him.

GEORGE WEBB

Is another of Franklin's early literary associates in Philadelphia, whose characters live in the pages of the Autobiography. Franklin found him, on his return from England, a youth of eighteen, apprenticed to his former master Keimer, who had bought his time" for four years. Webb was a runaway adventurer from England, and gave this account of himself, as Franklin has related it:-"That he was born in Gloucester, educated at a grammar-school, and had been distinguished among the scholars for some apparent superiority in performing his part when they exhibited plays; belonged to the Wits' Club there,

and had written some pieces in prose and verse, which were printed in the Gloucester newspapers. Thence was sent to Oxford; there he continued about a year, but not well satisfied; wishing, of all things, to see London, and become a player. At length, receiving his quarterly allowance of fifteen guineas, instead of discharging his debts, he went out of town, hid his gown in a furzebush, and walked to London: where, having no friend to advise him, he fell into bad company, 300n spent his guineas, found no means of being introduced among the players, grew necessitous, pawned his clothes, and wanted bread. Walking the street very hungry, and not knowing what to do with himself, a crimp's bill was put into his hand, offering immediate entertainment and encouragement to such as would bind themselves to serve in America. He went directly, signed the indentures, was put into the ship and came over; never writing a line to his friends to acquaint them what was become of him. He was lively, witty, good-natured, and a pleasant companion; but idle, thoughtless, and imprudent to the last degree."

Webb was afterwards enabled to raise himself out of his apprenticeship into a partnership with Keimer, and he became a member of Franklin's conversation club, the Junto; and in 1731 perpetrated a copy of verses, entitled Batchelors' Hall, descriptive of a place of entertainment in the suburbs, which was published with the honorable title of " A Poem," with a motto from Cicero on the title-page, and two complimentary effusions in verse by J. Brientnall and J. Taylor, who showed themselves hopeful of the American muse on the occasion.

Taylor at the time kept a mathematical school in the city, and published an almanac,* which preceded Franklin's. He published in 1728 a poetical piece entitled Pennsylvania. He was alive in 1736, in an extreme old age.

What further became of Webb we know not. We are content with this look at him through the Franklin microscope.

BATCHELORS' HALL: A POEM.

O spring, thou fairest season of the year,
How lovely soft, how sweet dost thou appear!
What pleasing landskips meet the gazing eye!
How beauteous nature does with nature vie:
Gay scenes around the fancy does invite,
And universal beauty prompts to write.
But chiefly that proud Dome on Delaware's stream,
Of this my humble song the nobler theme,
Claims all the tribute of these rural lays,
And tunes e'en my harsh voice to sing its praise.

Say, goddess, tell me, for to thee is known,
What is, what was, and what shall e'er be done;

*The first book printed in Pennsylvania was "An Almanac for the Year of the Christian Account 1687. By Daniel Leeds, Student in Agriculture. Printed and sold by William Bradford, near Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania, pro anno 1687." Leeds left the colony not long after in dudgeon with the Quakers, as we may infer from his pamphlet published by Bradford, in New York, in 1699: "A Trumpet sounded out of the Wilderness of America, which may serve as a warning to the government and people of England to beware of Quakerism; wherein is shown how in Pennsylvania and thereaway, where they have the government in their own hands, they hire and encourage men to fight; and how they persecute, fine, and imprison, and take away goods for conscience' sake." -Fisher's Early Poets, Pa.

.

Why stands this dome erected on the plain?
For pleasure was it built, or else for gain?
For midnight revels was it ever thought,
Shall impious doctrines ever here be taught?
Or else for nobler purposes design'd,
To cheer and cultivate the mind,
With mutual love each glowing breast inspire,
Or cherish friendship's now degenerate fire.
Say, goddess, say, do thou the truth reveal,
Say, what was the design, if good or ill?

Fired with the business of the noisy town,
The weary Batchelors their cares disown;
For this loved seat they all at once prepare,
And long to breathe the sweets of country air;
On nobler thoughts their active minds employ,
And a select variety enjoy.

"Tis not a revel, or lascivious night,
That to this hall the Batchelors invite;
Much less shall impious doctrines here be taught,
Blush ye accusers at the very thought:
For other, O far other ends designed,

To mend the heart, and cultivate the mind.
Mysterious nature here unveil'd shall be,
And knotty points of deep philosophy;
Whatever wonders undiscover'd are,

Deep hid in earth, or floating high in air,
Though in the darkest womb of night involv'd,
Shall by the curious searcher here be solv'd.
Close to the dome a garden shall be join'd,
A fit employment for a studious mind:
In our vast woods whatever samples grow,
Whose virtues none, or none but Indians know,
Within the confines of this garden brought,
To rise with added lustre shall be taught;
Then cull'd with judgment each shall yield its juice,
Saliferous balsam to the sick man's use:
A longer date of life mankind shall boast,
And death shall mourn her ancient empire lost.

But yet sometimes the all-inspiring bowl
To laughter shall provoke and cheer the soul;
The jocund tale to humor shall invite,
And dedicate to wit a jovial night.

Not the false wit the cheated world admires
The mirth of sailors, or of country_squires;
Nor the gay punster's, whose quick sense affords
Nought but a miserable play on words;

Nor the grave quidnunc's, whose inquiring head
With musty scraps of journals must be fed:
But condescending, genuine, apt, and fit,
Good nature is the parent of true wit;

Though gay, not loose; though learned, yet still clear;

Though bold, yet modest; human, though severe ; Though nobly thirsting after honest fame,

In spite of wit's temptation, keeping friendship's

name.

O friendship, heavenly flame! by far above
The ties of nature, or of dearer love:
How beauteous are thy paths, how well designed,
To soothe the wretched mortal's restless mind!
By thee inspir'd we wear a soul sedate,
And cheerful tread the thorny paths of fate.
Then music too shall cheer this fair abode,
Music, the sweetest of the gifts of God;
Music, the language of propitious love;
Music, that things inanimate can move.

Ye winds be hush'd, let no presumptuous breeze
Now dare to whistle through the rustling trees;
Thou Delaware a while forget to roar,
Nor dash thy foaming surge against the shore:
Be thy green nymphs upon thy surface found,
And let thy stagnant waves confess the sound;

Let thy attentive fishes all be nigh;
For fish were always friends to harmony;
Witness the dolphin which Arion bore,
And landed safely on his native shore.
Let doting cynics snarl, let noisy zeal
Tax this design with act or thought of ill;
Let narrow souls their rigid morals boast,
Till in the shadowy name the virtue's lost;
Let envy strive their character to blast,
And fools despise the sweets they cannot taste;
This certain truth let the inquirer know,
It did from good and generous motives flow.

JOSEPH BRIENTNALL

WAS another member of the "Junto," whom Franklin has sketched in a few words :-" A copier of deeds for the scriveners,—a good-natured, friendly, middle-aged man, a great lover of poetry, reading all he could meet with, and writing some that was tolerable; very ingenious in making little knick-knackeries, and of sensible conversation."

When Keimer, through the treacherous friendship of the Oxford scapegrace Webb, became acquainted with Franklin's plan of starting a newspaper, and anticipated the project; Franklin, whose plans were not fully ripe, threw the weight of his talent into the opposition journal of Bradford, The Weekly Mercury, where he commenced publishing the series of Essays, in the manner of the Spectator, entitled, The Busy-Body.* The first, fifth, and eighth numbers were Franklin's, and they were afterwards continued for some months by Brientnall. A more practical satisfaction soon followed, when Keimer's paper fell into Franklin's hands, and became known as the Philadelphia Gazette, of 1729. As a specimen of Brientnall we take his lines prefixed to Webb's "Batchelors' Hall:

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The generous Muse concern'd to see
Detraction bear so great a sway,
Descends sometimes, as now to thee,
To chase ill fame and spite away.
Censorious tongues, which nimbly move,
Each virtuous name to persecute,
Thy muse has taught the truth to prove,
And be to base conjectures mute.

Let every deed that merits praise,

Be justly crown'd with spritely verse; And every tongue shall give the bays To him whose lines they, pleas'd, rehearse. Long stand the dome, the garden grow, And may thy song prove always true: I wish no greater good below, Than this to hear, and that to view.

JAMES RALPH.

THE exact birthplace of this writer, who attained considerable distinction by his political pamphlets and histories in England, and whose memory has been embalmed for posterity in the autobiography of Franklin and the Dunciad of Pope, has never been precisely ascertained. We first hear of him in the company of Franklin at Philadelphia, as one of his young literary cronies whom the sage confesses at that time to have in

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doctrinated in infidelity. In those days Ralph a clerk to a merchant," and much inclined to "give himself up entirely to poetry. was," adds Franklin, ingenious, genteel in his manners, and extremely eloquent; I think I never knew a prettier talker." He embarked with Franklin, as is well known, on his first voyage to England, leaving a wife and child behind him, as an illustration of his opinions, and the two cronies spent their money in London together, "inseparable companions" in Little Britain. Ralph rapidly went through all the phases of the old London school of preparation for a hack political pamphleteer. He tried the playhouse, but Wilkes thought he had no qualifications for the stage; he projected a weekly paper on the plan of the Spectator, but the publisher Roberts did not approve of it; and even an attempt at the drudgery of a scrivener with the Temple lawyers was unsuccessful. He managed, however, to associate with his fortunes a young milliner who lodged in the house with the two adventurers; but he was compelled to leave her, and go into the country for the employment of a schoolmaster, and Franklin took advantage of his absence to make some proposals to the mistress which were rejected, and which Ralph pleaded afterwards as a receipt in full for all his obligations, pecuniary and otherwise, to his friend. While in the provinces, where, by the way, he called himself Mr. Franklin, he found employment in writing an epic poem which he sent by instalments to his friend at London, who dissuaded him from it, and backed his opinions with a copy of Young's satire on the folly of authorship, which was then just pub

His

lished. He continued scribbling verses, however, till, as Franklin says, "Pope cured him." first publication appears to have been Night, a poem, in 1728, which is commemorated in the couplet of the Dunciad:

Silence, ye wolves, while Ralph to Cynthia howls,
And makes Night hideous-answer him ye owls:*
a compliment which was paid not so much to that
poem, whatever its demerits, as to a poetical
squib which Ralph had published, entitled Saw-
ney, reflecting unpleasently on Pope, Swift, and
Gay. Night was followed in 1729 by the Epic
Zeuma, or the Love of Liberty. It is an octavo
volume in three books, a story of love and war
of a Peruvian chieftain whose mistress is captured
by the Spaniards, and recovered again, while the
hero falls in a grand battle. Of this work the
curious reader of Franklin may be pleased with a
specimen, and we accordingly quote a passage
from a copy in the Harvard College library, the
only one we have met with.

'Tis hard for man, bewilder'd in a maze
Of doubtful reas'nings, to assign the cause
Why heav'n's all-ruling pow'r supremely just
And good, shou'd give Iberia's cruel sons
Unbounded leave to travel o'er the globe,
And search remotest climes; to stretch their sway
Through all the western world; to exile Peace
And Liberty, with all their train of joys
From the afflicted lands; and proudly vex
Th' unhappy nations with oppressive rule.

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In ages past, as time revolv'd the year,
"Twas all a round of innocent delights;
The fearless Natives rarely heard of war
And its destructive ills; Famine, Disease,
And all the various plagues of other realms,
Were there unknown; life was a constant scene
Of harmless pleasures; and, when full of days,
The woodland hunter and the toiling swain
Like ripen'd fruit that, in the midnight shade,
Drops from the bough, in peace and silence sank
Into the grave. But when the Spanish troops,
In search of plunder, crowded on the shore,
And claimed, by right divine, the sovereign rule,
Another scene began; and all the woes,
Mankind can suffer, took their turn to reign.

66

A Pindaric ode in blank verse, The Muse's Address to the King, was another of Ralph's poetical attempts. The year 1730 produced a play, The Fashionable Lady, or Harlequin's Opera, performed at Goodman's Fields, followed by several others, The Fall of the Earl of Essex, Lawyer's Feast, and Astrologer. Pope, not the fairest witness, says that he praised himself in the journals, and that upon being advised to study the laws of dramatic poetry before he wrote for the stage, he replied, Shakspeare writ without rules."* His ability at writing, however, and making himself useful, gained him the support of Dodington, and secured him a puff in that politician's Diary. He wrote in the newspapers of the day, the London Journal, the Weekly Medley, and published The Remembrancer in the use of his patron. His History of England during the reigns of King William, Queen Anne, and George I.; with an Introductory Review of the reigns of the Royal Brothers Charles II. and James II.; in which are to be found the seeds of the Revolution, was published in two huge folios, 1744-6, and he is said to have had in it Dodington's assistance. He was also the author of two octavo volumes on The Use and Abuse of Parlia ments from 1660 to 1744, and a Review of the Public Buildings of London, in 1731, has been attributed to him. Charles James Fox has spoken well of his historical "acuteness" and "diligence,' and noticed his "sometimes falling into the common error of judging by the event." His last production in 1758, for which his active experiences had fully supplied him with material, was entitled The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade Stated, with regard to Booksellers, the Stage and the Public. "It is," says Drake,

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composed with spirit and feeling; enumerating all the bitter evils incident to an employment so precarious, and so inadequately rewarded; and abounds in anecdote and entertainment." Having thus recorded what he had learnt of this profession, and obtained a pension too late to oujoy it long, he died of a fit of the gout at Chiswick, Jan. 24, 1762.§

Note to the Dunciad, Bk. iii. v. 165. This is Pope's own note, not Warburton's, as Chalmers alleges. + History of James II. 4to. 179.

One of the anecdotes of Ralph is particularly amusing. We once read it among some manuscript notes by Mrs. Piozzi, to a copy of Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Garrick wishing to invite Ralph to a dinner party at his house, told his servant to carry him a card. The Milesian mistaking the order, went after him with Mr. Garrick's respects, who had sent a cart to bring him to dinner. It is needless to add he was missing at the table. Upon the host making inquiry it was found that Mr. Ralph had expressed his disapproval of the conveyance. § Franklin's Autobiography. Chalmers's Biog. Dict. Drake's

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, whose very name, since it was consecrated by the poet Chaucer, is freshly suggestive of freedom, was born in Boston, January 17, 1706. He was the youngest son of the youngest son for five generations, the fifteenth child of his father out of a family of seventeen, fourteen of whom were born in America, and of these ten were the children of his mother, the second wife, and all grew up to years of maturity and were married. His father was a non-conformist emigrant from England, who came to Boston about

HOBERTS Sr..

Birthplace of Franklin.

1685, a man of strength and prudence of character; descended from a family which, though it could claim no other nobility than in nature's heraldry of honest labor, had shown considerable persistency in that; holding on to a small freehold estate of thirty acres in Northamptonshire for a period of three hundred years, the eldest son steadily pursuing the business of a smith. Franklin was not averse to these claims of antiquity. In his Autobiography he mentions having examined the registers at Ecton, and "found an account of the family marriages and burials from the year 1555 only." An uncle who died four years before his illustrious nephew was born, heralded the rising instincts of the race by his struggles out of the smithery into a legal education, and a position of considerable influence in the county. There was also some taste for literature making its appearance from another uncle, Benjamin, our Franklin's godfather, who lived to an old age in Boston, and left behind him, in 1728, two quarto volumes of manuscript poems, occasional family verses, acrostics, and the like. One of these compositions, sent to the young Benjamin at the age of seven, on some demonstration of precocity, turned out to be prophetic.

SENT TO BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, 1718.

"Tis time for me to throw aside my pen, When hanging sleeves read, write, and rhyme like

men.

This forward spring foretells a plenteous crop; For, if the bud bear grain, what will the top!

Essays, Biog. Crit. & Hist. 1809. 1. 94. Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, ix. 590.

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In 1710 he had written this Acrostic to his nephew.

Be to thy parents an obedient son;
Each day let duty constantly be done;
Never give way to sloth, or lust, or pride,
If free you'd be from thousand ills beside;
Above all ills be sure avoid the shelf
Man's danger lies in Satan, sin, and self.
In virtue, learning, wisdom, progress make;
Ne'er shrink at suffering for thy Saviour's sake.
Fraud and all falsehood in thy dealings flee,
Religious always in thy station be;
Adore the maker of thy inward part,
Now's the accepted time, give him thy heart;
Keep a good conscience, 'tis a constant friend,
Like judge and witness this thy acts attend.
In heart with bended knee, alone, adore
None but the Three in One for evermore.*

Franklin's mother represented a literary name of the old province of Massachusetts. She was the daughter of Peter Folger, of whose little poetical volume, "A Looking Glass for the Times," asserting liberty of conscience, we have already given some account.t

The early incidents of Franklin's life are happily familiar, through the charming pages of the Autobiography, to every American reader. There is not an intelligent school-boy who does not know the story of his escape from the noisome soap and candle manufactory of his father into the printingoffice of his brother; his commencement of the literary life, when, like the young Oliver Goldsmith, he wrote ballads for the streets, on the Light-house tragedy and Black-beard the pirate, and desisted from this unprofitable course of poetry when his father told him that "verse makers were generally beggars;" his borrowing books and sitting up in the night to read them; buying others by the savings of time and money in his printingfor himself, and finding opportunity to study them, office dinner of a slice of bread and a glass of water; his stealthily slipping his articles under the door of his newspaper office, the New England Courant, at night; his endurance of various slights and humilities, till nature and intellect grew too strong in him for his brother's tyranny, when he broke the connexion of his apprenticeship and betook himself to Philadelphia, where he ate that

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Mr. Sparks supplies these passages from the MS. volumes still preserved in Boston. "The handwriting," says he, "is beautiful, with occasional specimens of shorthand, in which Dr. Franklin says his uncle was skilled. The poetical merits of the compositions cannot be ranked high, but frequently the measure is smooth and the rhymes are well chosen. His thoughts run chiefly on moral and religions subjects. Many of the Psalms are paraphrased in metre. The making of acros tics on the names of his friends was a favorite exercise. There are likewise numerous proofs of his ingenuity in forming anagrams, crosses, ladders, and other devices." Appendix to Life of Franklin, Works, i. 540.

+ Ante, p. 53.

memorable "puffy" roll in the streets, observed as he went along by Miss Read, his future wife; his first sleep in the city in the Quaker meeting; his printing-house work and education; his singular association with Governor Keith, and the notice which he received from Burnet, the Governor of New York, as he journeyed along, marking thus early his career and influence with titled personages, which carried him to the thrones of kings themselves.

That "odd volume of the Spectator," too, which directed his youthful tastes, how often do we meet with its kindly influences in American literature. It turns up again and again in the pages of Freneau, Dennie, Paulding, Irving; and we have had another good look at it lately through the lorgnette of Master Ik Marvel.*

Franklin left Boston at seventeen, in 1723; visited England the following year, worked at his trade, and wrote a treatise of infidel metaphysics, and returned to Philadelphia in 1726. The plan

for the conduct of life which he wrote on this voyage homewards, has been lost. Its scope may be readily gathered from his writings. Industry, we may be sure, formed a prominent feature in it, and economy of happiness the next, by which a man should live on as good terms as possible with himself and his neighbors. In his early life, Franklin had exposed himself to some danger by his habit of criticism. More than one passage of his writings warns the reader against this tendency. Though he never appears to have wanted firmness on proper occasions, he settled down upon the resolution to speak ill of no one whatever, and as much good as possible of everybody.

On his return to Philadelphia, he established the club, the Junto, which lasted many years, and was a means not only of improvement but of political influence, as his opportunities for exercising it increased. The steps of Franklin's progress were now rapid. He established himself as a printer, purchased the Pennsylvania Gazette, then recently started, and which he had virtually projected in 1729; published the same year a pamphlet, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency; married in 1730; assisted in founding the Philadelphia Library in 1731; the next year published his Almanac; was chosen in 1736 clerk of the General Assembly; became deputy postmaster at Philadelphia in 1737; was all this while a printer, and publishing the newspaper, not dividing the duties of his printing office with a partner until 1748; in 1741 published The General Magazine and Historical Chronicle for all the British Plantations in America; invented the stove which bears his name in 1742; proposed the American Philosophical Society in 1743; established the Academy, out of which the University of Pennsylvania finally grew, in 1749; in 1752 demonstrated his theory of the identity of lightning with electricity by his famous kite experiment in a field near Philadelphia; on the anticipation of war with France was sent as a delegate to the Congress of Commissioners of the Colonies at Albany in 1754, where he proposed a system of

Franklin did not forget the Spectator, the friend of his boyhood, in his last days. In his will he bequeathes to the son of his friend, Mrs. Hewson, "a set of Spectators, Tatlers, and Guardians, handsomely bound."

union which in important points anticipated the present Confederation; opposed taxation by parliament; assisted Braddock's Expedition by his energy; was himself for a short time a military commander on the frontier in 1756; was the next year sent to England by the Assembly, a popular representative against the pretensions of the Proprietaries, when Massachusetts, Maryland, and Georgia also appointed him their agent; took part in the Historical Review of Pennsyl vania, a trenchant volume on the affairs of the Colony, in 1759; wrote a pamphlet, The Interest of Great Britain Considered in the retention of Čanada, in 1760; received the degree of Doctor of Laws from the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford, and returned to America in 1762. Two years after he returned to England as Colonial agent; pursued his course industriously and courteously for the interests of the old Government, but firmly for the right claimed at home; bore a full Examination before Parliament on the relations of America to the Stamp Act, which was published and read with general interest; was confronted by Wedderburn, the Solicitor-General for the crown, as counsel for Hutchinson at the memorable privy council examination of January, 1774; returned again to Philadelphia in 1775; signed the Declaration of Independence in Congress; went ambassador to France in October of the same year, when he was seventy, and displayed his talents in diplomacy and society; returning after signing the treaty of peace in 1785 to America, when he was made President of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for three years; was a delegate to the Federal Convention in 1787, and retaining his full powers of mind and constitutional cheerfulness to the last, died April 17, 1790, in his eighty-fourth year.

The famous epitaph which he wrote in his days of youth, at the age of twenty-three, was not placed over his grave in Philadelphia.

The Body
Of

Benjamin Franklin,
Printer,

(Like the cover of an old book,

Its contents torn out,

And stript of its lettering and gilding,)
Lies here, food for worms.

Yet the work itself shall not be lost,
For it will, as he believed, appear once more,
In a new

And more beautiful edition,
Corrected and amended

By The Author.*

We have already printed, ante, p. 22. Woodbridge's epitaph on Cotton, supposed to be the original of this. There is another old New England source in the lines written in 1681, by Joseph Capen, Minister of Topsfield, on the death of John Foster, who, Mr. Sparks tells us, set up the first printing-press in Boston.

Thy body, which no activeness did lack,
Now's laid aside like an old almanac;
But for the present only's out of date,
"Twill have at length a far more active state.
Yea, though with dust thy body soiled be,
Yet at the resurrection we shall see

A fair edition, and of matchless worth,
Free from Errata, new in Heaven set forth;
"Tis but a word from God, the great Creator,
It shall be done when he saith Imprimatur.

Davis, in his Travels in America, finds another source for

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