Wiliam Cabell Bruce

“ But, when that brightest of female virtues shines among other perfections of body and mind in the same person, it makes the woman more lovely than an angel.
The spinning wheel was a fit symbol of the narrow, struggling life, which was to be Jane Mecom's portion, and which would have imposed upon her a load heavier than she could have borne if her good Philadelphia genius had not always been by her side, either in person or by his watchful proxy, Jonathan Williams, the father of his grandnephew of that name, to sustain her fainting footsteps. ”

“ Franklin was simply that of a beautiful and brilliant woman, to whom coquetry was an art, and whose intellectual activity had been stimulated, and vanity gratified, by the homage of a brilliant, magnetic and famous man, who possessed to a remarkable degree the faculty of rendering his splendid intellectual powers subservient to purely social uses. It was no slight thing to a woman such as Madame Brillon to be the Vainqueur du Vainqueur de la Terre, and little less than this did all France at that time insist that Franklin was. ”

“ If for no other reason, Franklin was not Washington because he lacked the family traditions and early social advantages of Washington, and perhaps Washington might have been more like Franklin, if he had had some of Franklin's humor. While the resemblance is limited, Franklin does resemble in some respects Jefferson who was too scientific in spirit and too liberal in his opinions not to be a little of a skeptic and a heretic himself. But nothing can be more certain than the fact that Franklin was esteemed by his contemporaries not only a great but a good man. ”

“ We shall never suffer from gout or nervous troubles there. Mr. Mesmer will content himself with playing on the armonica, without wearying us with the electric fluid; ambition, envy, snobbery, jealousy, prejudice, all these will vanish at the sound of the trumpet. A lasting, sweet and peaceful friendship will animate every gathering. Every day we shall love one another, in order that we may love one another still more the day after; in a word, we shall be completely happy. In the meantime, let us get all the good we can out of this poor world of ours. ”

“ One of the statements of this letter was that he had exact accounts of every person of his family since the year 1555, when it was established in England. Such a thing as sensitiveness to his humble origin or the social obscurity of his kinsfolk could find no lodgment in a mind so capacious, a heart so kind, or a nature so full of manly self-respect as his. To say nothing more, he was too much of a philosopher not to realize how close even the high-born nobleman, when detached from privilege and social superstition, is to the forked radish, to which elemental man has been likened. ”

“ That Franklin should ever, even at the age of twenty-two, have composed anything in the way of a creed so fanciful, not to say fantastic, is nothing short of an enormity, even more startlingly out of harmony with his usually sound and sure-footed intelligence than the whimsical letter to General Charles Lee, in which, on the eve of the American Revolution, he advised a return to bows and arrows as efficient instruments of modern warfare. ”

“ But the closest friendship that Franklin formed in England was with Mary, or Polly, Stevenson. To her, perhaps, the most delightful of all his familiar letters were written—letters so full of love and watchful interest as to suggest a father rather than a friend. It is not too much to say that they are distinguished by a purity and tenderness of feeling almost perfect, and by a combination of delicate humor and instructive wisdom to which it would be hard to find a parallel. ”

“ There is a vast difference between the situation of a man, who relies upon his memory for the scattered incidents of his past life, and that of a biographer whose field of vision takes them all in at one glance. It is true that Franklin did not know, before he left London, that Deborah had married, but the reasons he gives in the Autobiography for desiring to return to Philadelphia are only that he had grown tired of London, remembered with pleasure the happy months that he had spent in Pennsylvania, and wished again to see it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ How deeply the Abbé Morellet was attached to Franklin is feelingly revealed in the letters which he wrote to him after the latter had arrived safely in America; to say nothing of the Abbé's Memoirs.
May your days [he wrote in one of these letters] be prolonged and be free from pain; may your friends long taste the sweetness and the charm of your society, and may those whom the seas have separated from you be still happy in the thought that the end of your career will be, as our good La Fontaine says, "the evening of a fine day." ”

“ His life was like a full five-act play—prophetic prologue and stately epilogue, and swelling scene imposed upon swelling scene, until the tallow chandler's son, rising from the humblest levels of human fortune to the highest by uninterrupted gradations of invincible success, finally becomes the recipient of such a degree of impressive homage as has rarely been paid to anyone by the admiration and curiosity of mankind. ”

“ Happiness is so uncertain, so full of crosses, that the deep conviction that we shall be happier in another life can alone tide us over the trials of this one. In Paradise we shall be reunited, never to leave each other again! We shall there live on roasted apples only; the music will be made up of Scotch airs; all parties will be given over to chess, so that no one may be disappointed; every one will speak the same language; the English will be neither unjust nor wicked there; the women will not be coquettes, the men will be neither jealous nor too gallant ”

“ There are certain human feelings which rise in moments of uncommon stress or fervor from the profoundest depths of our being to our lips and take on the form and rhythm of sonorous religious utterance, if for no better reason, because no other language is lofty or musical enough to serve aptly the purposes of such supreme occasions; and this is true even of an individuality so meagrely spiritual as that of Franklin. ”

“ I am amazed beyond measure [she wrote to Deborah, when she heard of the threatened attack on Franklin's house] that your house was threatened in the tumult. I thought there had been none among you would proceed to such a length to persecute a man merely for being the best of characters, and really deserving good from the hand and tongue of all his fellow creatures.... What a wretched world would this be if the vile of mankind had no laws to restrain them. ”

“ How profound was the mutual respect and affection that Washington and Franklin entertained for each other, we have seen. It is an inspiring thing to note how the words of the latter swell, as with the strains of some heroic measure, when his admiration for the great contemporary, whose services to "the glorious cause" alone exceeded his, lifts him up from the lower to the higher levels of our emotional and intellectual nature. ”

“ But when we see him accept this illegitimate son as if he had come to him over his right shoulder instead of his left, take him under his family roof, give him every advantage that education and travel could confer, seek an honorable alliance for him, put him in the way to become the Governor of Colonial New Jersey, even affectionately recognize his illegitimate son as a grandson, we almost feel as if such ingenuous naturalism had a kind of bastard moral value of its own. ”

“ As events moved along apace, and Franklin found himself in a world, once again ravaged and ensanguined by war, the triple birth of human folly, greed and atrocity, his heart, irrevocably enlisted as it was in the American cause, went out into one generous effort after another to establish at least a few peaceful sanctuaries where the nobler impulses and aims of human nature might be safe from the destructive rage of its malignant passions. ”

“ It was an observation of Franklin that the quantity of good that may be done by one man, if he will make a business of doing good, is prodigious. The saying in its various forms presupposed the sacrifice of all studies, amusements and avocations. No such self-immolation, it is needless to affirm, marked his versatile and happy career, yet rarely has any single person, whose attention has been engaged by other urgent business besides that of mankind, ever furnished such a pointed example of the truth of the observation. ”

“ In teaching and pursuing a system of morals, which was nothing but a scheme of enlightened selfishness, dependent for its aliment upon pecuniary ease and habit, he was simply faithful to a general conception of life and character entirely too earthbound and grovelling to satisfy those higher intuitions and ideals which, be the hard laws of our material being what they may, not only never permit our grosser natures to be at peace, but reject with utter disdain the suggestion that they and our vices and infirmities are but offshoots of the same parent stock of selfishness. ”

“ Poor Richard, of course, had to have his proverb in war as well as peace. Were the union formed, and the fighting men of the Province once united, thoroughly armed and disciplined, the very fame of strength and readiness, Plain Truth thought, would be a means of discouraging the enemy, "for," said Franklin, "'tis a wise and true Saying, that One Sword often keeps another in the Scabbard. The Way to secure Peace is to be prepared for War." ”

“ I wish it were possible, from this instance, to invent a method of embalming drowned persons, in such a manner that they may be recalled to life at any period, however distant; for having a very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence, I should prefer to any ordinary death, the being immersed in a cask of Madeira wine, with a few friends, till that time, to be then recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country! ”

“ 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? ”

“ To men of all kinds his benevolent interest in so many different forms in the welfare and progress of human society, his efforts to assuage the ferocity of war, the very rod, with which he disarmed the fury of the storm-cloud, seemed to mark him as a benignant being, widely removed by his sagacity and goodness from the short-sighted and selfish princes and statesmen of his day whose thoughts and aims appeared to be wholly centred upon intrigue and blood. ”

“ In the land of the blind the one-eyed mole is king, and the probability is that the Governor was actuated by nothing more than the belief that in a province, where there were no seasoned generals, a man with Franklin's talents, energy and resource would be likely to prove the best impromptu commander that he could find. If so, his calculations came to nothing, for Franklin, who always saw things as they were, could discern no reason why he should be unfit to be a colonel and yet fit to be a general. ”

“ It is a wise man who speaks, and who tries to comfort his too sensitive daughter by telling her the truth. Oh, my father, I beseech your friendship, your healthy philosophy; my heart hears you and is submissive to you. Give me strength to take the place of an indifference that your child can never feel. ”

“ Perhaps it was only real sympathy excited by the harassments to which her husband, whom she devotedly loved, was incessantly subjected by his public activity, his reputation for wise counsel, and his ever-increasing renown. Perhaps it was the mere jealousy of affection inspired by her sense of her own unfitness in point of education and intellectual companionship to be the wife of a man whose doorstep could be so haunted. ”

“ In a later letter to William Franklin, he said, "I am here [Pg 477] among a People that love and respect me, a most amiable Nation to live with; and perhaps I may conclude to die among them; for my Friends in America are dying off, one after another, and I have been so long abroad, that I should now be almost a Stranger in my own Country."
Nor did the love for France that he took back with him to the United States grow at all fainter with absence and the flow of time. ”

“ It at least tickles the fancy a little, to use Josiah's phrase, to imagine that the flame of the Ecton forge lit up, generation after generation, the face of some brawny, honest toiler, not unlike the village blacksmith, whose rugged figure and manly, simple-hearted, God-fearing nature are portrayed with so much dignity and beauty in the well-known verses of Longfellow. ”

“ Once Franklin sought to corner Madame Brillon with a story, which makes us feel for a moment as if the rod of transformation was beginning to work a backward spell, and the Benjamin Franklin of Craven Street and Independence Hall to be released from the spell of the French Circe:
To make you better realize the force of my demonstration that you do not love me, I commence with a little story:
A beggar asked a rich Bishop for a louis by way of alms. You are wild. No one gives a louis to a beggar. ”

“ This is the language of a man who finds a phrase and thinks he has found a fact. Arthur Lee said on one occasion that Franklin was "the meanest of all mean men, the most corrupt of all corrupt men"; but this was merely the froth of a rabid mental condition. Stephen Sayre wrote to Capellen that Franklin was a "great villain," but Sayre had unsuccessfully solicited office from Franklin. Besides, this extraordinary character seems to have nearly, if not quite, answered Franklin's description of a man who has neither good sense enough to be an honest man nor wit enough for a rogue. ”

“ He was too full of the scientific spirit of speculation and distrust, he was too practical and worldly-wise to readily surrender the right of private judgment, or to give himself over to any form of truly devotional fervor, but he had entirely too keen an appreciation of the practical value of religion in restraining human vices and passions and promoting human benevolence to have any disposition to destroy or impair its sway. ”

“ The closest relations existed between Franklin and the Le Veillard family, while he was in France, and, when he left that country, Le Veillard was not content to accompany him simply to the seacoast, but was his companion as far as Southampton. To him, Abel James, Benjamin Vaughan and the Shipleys we are beholden for the fact that the Autobiography was brought down to the year 1757; there to stop like the unfinished tower which tantalized the world with a haunting sense of its rare worth and incompleteness. ”

“ Other expressions of the same character furnish a religious or quasi-religious setting to Franklin's thoughts upon his own dissolution. To his brave and cheerful spirit, which experienced so little difficulty in accommodating its normal philosophy to all the fixed facts and laws of existence, death was as natural as life—a thing not to be invited before its time but to be accepted with unmurmuring serenity when it came. The only certain things in this world, he said in his home-spun way, are death and taxes. ”

“ If there ever was an American, if there ever was a citizen of the world, if there ever was a true child of the eighteenth century, it was he. His humanitarian sympathies, his catholic temper, his generous, unobstructed outlook enabled him without difficulty to adjust himself with ease to the genius of every people with whom he was brought into familiar contact. ”

“ In one of his works, Lord Kames spoke of him as "a man who makes a great figure in the learned world; and who would make a still greater figure for benevolence and candor, were virtue as much regarded in this declining [Pg 21] age as knowledge." Less formal was the heartfelt tribute of Dr. Samuel Cooper, of Massachusetts, after many years of intercourse: "Your friendship has united two things in my bosom that seldom meet, pride and consolation: it has been the honor and the balm of my life." ”

“ Agriculture may diminish its Labour and double its Produce; all Diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured, not excepting even that of Old Age, and our Lives lengthened at pleasure even beyond the antediluvian Standard. O that moral Science were in as fair a way of Improvement, that Men would cease to be Wolves to one another, and that human Beings would at length learn what they now improperly call Humanity!
Mixed with Franklin's other feelings about war, as we have seen, was a profound sense of its pecuniary wastefulness. ”