And, later: "Oh, that I could mitigate your pains or griofs' but instead of being able to do that, I and mine have always been a great cause of grief and trouble to you, though, blessed be God, you have never discovered any thing but the pleasure of doing good, and Heaven has blessed you in the deed; though you suffer what is the lot of all men, in a greater or less degree, pain and sickness, the consciousness of the rectitude of all your actions, both for public and private benefit, will support your hope for a more blessed state to all eternity, where, my dear brother, we shall meet; though may it be yet many years before you are called off this stage, in favor to the inhabitants, who will greatly miss you whenever that time comes. * * I suppose you see our news

*

papers, where you see how fond our people are to say something of Dr. Franklin, I believe mostly to do him honor, but some choose to embellish the language to their own fancy."

CHAPTER IV.

LAST LABORS.

THE labors of Dr. Franklin's last year were sufficient of themselves to give any one a great and lasting fame as a man of humor and public spirit. Yet, during a great part of the time, he lay upon his bed a prey to the most excruciating anguish. As he approached the close of his life, the paroxysms of his disease became more and more violent, and the intervals of relief were of shorter duration. No one, however, could ever perceive the slightest diminution either of the force or of the brilliancy of his mind. Except when he was totally prostrated by the long endurance of pain, he was the same joyous, witty, story-telling, benevolent Franklin, his friends had ever known him; happy still in the society of his philosophical brethren, happiest when surrounded by his many grandchildren. Mrs. Duane, wife of the Honorable William J. Duane, of General Jackson's cabinet, was one of those grandchildren who played about the bed of this patient, suffering old man. She was a school-girl, eight years old, during Franklin's last year, and she lingered among

us until the spring of 1863, retaining almost to the last an extraordinary vigor of mind and body. I have heard her say that her most vivid recollection of that year was the interest which her grandfather took in her having her lesson duly learned for the next day. Every evening after tea, she was accustomed to go to his bedside, hand him her Webster's spelling-book, and say her lesson to him. She could remember little else, but this alone was worth going to Philadelphia to hear.

His affectionate old friend Mrs. Hewson, who had removed to Philadelphia upon his advice, records, that during the last two years of his life he had not two months in all of freedom from pain. No repining, no peevish expression, she says, ever escaped him. “When the pain was not too violent to be amused, he employed himself with his books, his pen, or in conversation with his friends; and upon every occasion displayed the clearness of his intellect and the cheerfulness of his temper. Even when the intervals from pain were so short, that his words were frequently interrupted, I have known him to hold a discourse in a sublime strain of piety. I never shall forget one day that I passed with our friend last summer (1789). I found him in bed in great agony; but, when that agony abated a little, I asked him if I should read to him. He said, Yes; and the first book I met with was 'Johnson's Lives of the Poets.' I read the Life of Watts, who was a favorite author with Dr. Franklin; and, instead of lulling him to sleep, it roused him to a display of the powers of his memory and his reason. He repeated several of Watts's Lyric Poems,' and descanted upon their sublimity in a strain worthy of them and of their pious author."

The warmest, the tenderest love cheered the last days of one who, if God is love, was as like God as any man then alive.

It is touching to read in the correspondence between Franklin and his sister, that one of the last topics on which they wrote was the one in which they had, perhaps, taken most interest when they were children together at the old home in Boston-namely, Soap. Mrs. Mecom had saved some of her father's recipes for making the more choice varieties of this article, in the hope that they might be useful to her descendants; and so they proved. She used to send her brother boxes of the soap made by her grandson, and he, to the very end of his life, interested himself in getting the soap sold in Philadelphia to advantage, often admonishing the young man to be

sure and send a good article. The reader may smile if I confess, that as often as I have read these soap letters, I have been reminded of Wordsworth's little poem, which stands first in his collected works, and upon which Coleridge so fondly comments in the Friend: "My heart leaps up when I behold

A Rainbow in the sky;

So was it when my life began;

So is it now I am a Man:

So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die!

The Child is Father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety."

Smile, reader, if you will; but I believe that Wordsworth and Coleridge would both have admitted the aptness of the poem, and agreed that a cake of soap becomes as poetical as a rainbow, when a Franklin, who began life by making it, occupies some of his last hours in selling it for his sister.

The French revolution, in 1789, had assumed its terrific aspect. In 1787, as we have seen, Dr. Franklin hailed the Assembly of the Notables as a good omen for France. To some friends surrounding his bedside who had been expressing their astonishment at the course of events in France, he is reported to have said: “Why, I see nothing singular in all this, but, on the contrary, what might naturally be expected. The French have served an apprenticeship to Liberty in this country, and now that they are out of their time, they have set up for themselves."* The queen, Marie Antoinette, recognized the same truth when she said, in the same year, in one of her letters to Madame de Polignac: "The time of illusions is past, and to-day we pay dear for our infatuation and enthusiasm for the American war."

In 1789, the year of the Bastile and the Lanterne, Franklin, too, began to tremble for his old friends, and for France. The chief actors in that fearful scene, Lafayette, Mirabeau, Necker, Brissot, the King, the Queen, de Vergennes, and others, he had been in the habit of meeting for nine years, entertaining and entertained; and for many of them he cherished the warmest regard. The news of

*Gazette of the United States, Sept. 4, 1790.

the dissensions in the States-general, of the famine, of the fall of the Bastile, the march upon Versailles, the lamp-post executions, the confinement of the King and Queen in their palace, filled him with anxiety. He could say with Charles Fox, "I wish the French were like our old friends, the Americans, and I should scarcely be afraid for them." But they were men of a different stamp, and had inherited far different circumstances. Franklin feared for his friends more than he hoped for France. His last year, however, was solaced by the amazing prosperity of his own country, which gained advantage from the very commotions that appalled and impoverished Europe.

His writings, during the year 1789, when we consider his great age and his bodily condition, are nothing short of wonderful. His famous protest against Latin and Greek as a means of education, of which some account has been given in a previous chapter, was written this year. It is done with all his ancient spirit and humor. In conversation at his own house, he would introduce the same subject, and use the illustrations which he employs so happily in his pamphlet. He is reported to have said, one evening, while talking on the subject: "When the custom of wearing broad cuffs with buttons first began, there was a reason for it; the cuffs might be brought down over the hands, and thus guard them from wet and cold. But gloves came into use, and the broad cuffs were unnecessary; yet the custom was still retained. So likewise with cocked hats. The wide brim, when let down, afforded a protection from the rain and sun. Umbrellas were introduced, yet fashion prevailed to keep cocked hats in vogue, although they were rather cumbersome than useful. Thus with the Latin language. When nearly all the books in Europe were written in that language, the study of it was essential in every system of education; but it is now scarcely needed, except as an accomplishment, since it has everywhere given place, as a vehicle of thought and knowledge, to some one of the modern tongues.'

How strange that, to this hour, in all the most famous schools of Christendom, those languages, which record but the prattle of infant Man, should be preferred, as a means of forming the mind of youth, to those glorious tongues in which a Goethe, a Schiller,

* Dr. Sparks, i., 526.

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a Montaigne, a Cervantes, a Shakspeare, a Franklin, utter the thoughts of Man coming of age!

One of Franklin's wittiest performances of this year, worthy of his best days, was an essay on the abuse of the liberty of the press in attacking private character. It was his boast, that his own newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, during an existence of nearly sixty years, under his own management and that of his successors, had never assailed the character of a private individual, nor indecently criticised the conduct of a public man. During the revolutionary war, the newspapers of the United States, provoked, it must be owned, by the outrageous vituperation of the tory organs in New York and elsewhere, had lapsed into habitual indecorum, and the habit remained when the provocation had ceased. The dissensions preceding and following the adoption of the new Constitution were bitter in the extreme, and the newspapers were the vehicles of violent recrimination. Franklin humorously advised the legislature to do one of two things, either to restrain the liberty of the press, or restore the liberty of the cudgel. He said, that if the liberty of the press meant merely the liberty of defaming private character, he, for his part, was willing to exchange his liberty of abusing for the privilege of not being abused. He waş willing, however, to leave the liberty of the press untouched, provided the liberty of the cudgel went with it pari passu.

"Thus, my fellow-citizens," said he, "if an impudent writer attacks your reputation, dearer to you perhaps than your life, and puts his name to the charge, you may go to him as openly and break his head. If he conceals himself behind the printer, and you can nevertheless discover who he is, you may in like manner way-lay him in the night, attack him behind, and give him a good drubbing. Thus far goes my project as to private resentment and retribution. But if the public should ever happen to be affronted, as it ought to be, with the conduct of such writers, I would not advise proceeding immediately to these extremities; but that we should in moderation content ourselves with tarring and feathering, and tossing them in a blanket. If, however, it should be thought that this proposal of mine may disturb the public peace, I would then humbly recommend to our legislators to take up the consideration of both liberties, that of the press, and that of the cudgel, and by an explicit law mark their extent and limits; and, at the