literature, with Philadelphia as the intellectual center. This city was second to Boston in literary prominence for the first sixty or seventy years of that century, and then New York began to surpass it, as we shall see in the next chapter. The population of the Middle Colonies was more mixed than that of the New England and Southern Colonies, and conditions were more favorable than in New England to freedom of expression. This was particularly true in Pennsylvania, which had been settled by Penn and his Quakers (1682), who believed in liberty of thought and conscience. Accordingly, we find in Philadelphia in the eighteenth century widespread interest in science and a generous literary culture. A printing press was early set up there; the first magazine in America was published in that city; and there was established the first public library. Besides an honorable list of scientists who flourished in colonial Philadelphia-such men as Bartram, the botanist; Rittenhouse, astronomer and mathematician; and Thomas Godfrey, inventor of the quadrant, there were Thomas Godfrey, Jr., the poet, and Francis Hopkinson, accomplished wit and versifier.

THOMAS GODFREY (1736-1763), son of the mathematician of that name, was born in Philadelphia and died in North Carolina in his twenty-seventh year. His brief life was spent in business and incidentally in writing verse, some of which was published in a magazine of his native city. Besides a number of short poems, which show the influence of seventeenth and eighteenth century English poets, Godfrey wrote a tragedy, The Prince of Parthia, which enjoys the distinction of being the first ever written in America. It was played in Philadelphia in 1767. While not without merit, The Prince of Parthia is naturally a crude performance and should be judged as a promise of greater things from its youthful author, whose career was cut short by untimely death.

FRANCIS HOPKINSON (1737-1791), lawyer, member of the Continental Congress, Federal judge, and signer of the Declara

tion of Independence, was one of the most accomplished and versatile men of his day. He tried his hand at various kinds of writing-prose allegory, essays, orations, scientific papers, songs, satires and burlesques,—and with conspicuous success, if we may judge from his contemporary fame. He was interested in all sorts of things, being, besides a learned and upright judge, an amateur scientist, a painter of local renown, a musician and composer. His best known prose writing is "A Pretty Story," an allegory with some of the genial humor of Addison and a touch of the satirical method of Swift. One ballad of his still makes fairly good reading, "The Battle of the Kegs," a political skit based on a real incident1 and immensely popular in Revolutionary times. Besides this best remembered ballad of Hopkinson, there is a song of his, "My Generous Heart Disdains," which strongly suggests the manner of the English Cavalier poets, Robert Herrick and George Wither, as these two stanzas show:

My gen'rous heart disdains

The slave of love to be,
I scorn his servile chains,
And boast my liberty.
This whining

And pining

And wasting with care,

Are not to my taste, be she ever so fair.

Still uncertain is tomorrow,

Not quite certain is to-day

Shall I waste my time in sorrow?

Shall I languish life away?

All because a cruel maid

Hath not love with love repaid.

'An American inventor, David Bushnell, had filled a number of kegs with powder and placed in them a crude kind of machinery for exploding them. This "fleet" of kegs he set afloat among the British shipping on the Delaware at Philadelphia in January, 1778. They caused considerable alarm to the enemy, but did little damage. This was the occasion of Hopkinson's ballad.

Among the heralds of American literature Francis Hopkinson, sometimes seriously, sometimes gayly exercising his talent for art, but always reminiscent of the past and with only a faint presentiment of the new times, is an interesting figure. To his son, Joseph Hopkinson, we owe the famous patriotic ode, "Hail Columbia! Happy Land!"

The one great name in the literature of the Middle Colonies, which became states before his death, is of course Benjamin Franklin, the Philadelphia printer. Another name, far less 'known but nevertheless worthy and interesting as a study in contrast, is that of the New Jersey Quaker, John Woolman. To a consideration of Franklin we will now proceed, and then to a brief sketch of his more spiritual contemporary.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (1706-1790)

His Life. Benjamin Franklin, publicist, scientist, and statesman, was born in Boston in 1706, the fifteenth child of a maker of soap and candles. The boy had slender educational opportunities because of his father's large family, but he early acquired a taste for reading and eagerly devoured such books as he could get his hands on, prominent among which were Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Plutarch's Lives, and Addison's Spectator. After a little schooling, he was put to work at the age of ten in his father's shop, but not liking this, he threatened to run off to sea; thereupon, his father apprenticed him to his brother James, a printer. He remained with his brother four or five years, during which he read much and diligently sought to improve his style by writing essays modeled on the Spectator for his brother's paper, The New England Courant. Except for the earlier composition of two ballads, this was Franklin's entrance upon authorship. About this time he had a disagreement with his brother, and ran away to Philadelphia to make his living under freer conditions.

Of his entrance into Philadelphia at the age of seventeen, Franklin has given an interesting account in his Autobiography. Here he found employment with a printer, and soon attracted the attention of the governor of the colony, who sent him to England to buy a printing outfit. Franklin found, however, on his arrival in London that he had been grossly deceived by his supposed friend, the governor, and that neither money nor a letter of introduction had been sent as promised. The next eighteen months were spent in London by the eighteen-year-old boy in working in printing

offices; meanwhile he was reading, writing, and meeting a few notable people. He returned to Philadelphia and engaged in the printing business, first in the employ of others, and later as owner of an establishment. He rapidly rose into prominence by his thrift and his interest in the affairs of the city, to whose welfare he made many substantial and enduring contributions. By 1748, when he was forty-two, he had made sufficient money to retire from business and devote himself to science and politics.

The rest of Franklin's long life was spent in the service of his country and in scientific research and experiment, for which he had early developed a fondness. He was a member of the Colonial Assembly and postmaster-general; he spent four or five years in London as the Assembly's agent and twelve years more (1764-'75) on a political mission for the colonies; then he went to France in the interests of the American struggle for independence, where he continued to represent his country until after the Revolutionary War. In these diplomatic positions, both in England and in France, he won the high esteem of people, scholars,

and statesmen. By the French in particular he was ardently admired. He returned to America in 1785, advanced in age and honors and still the public-spirited citizen. Two years later he was a member of the Constitutional Convention. In his long life of eighty-four years Franklin had known Cotton Mather and George Washington, had seen the colonies grow into a nation, and had signed four great historical documents-the "Declaration of Independence," the treaty of friendship with France, the treaty of peace with England, and the Constitution of the United States.

Characteristics.-Shrewdness, thrift, and common sense, are the qualities most conspicuous in Franklin. He is the embodiment of the practical side of the American character. New Englander as he was by birth, he is in striking contrast to the Puritan with his religious mysticism. Both in teachings and in life Franklin was essentially utilitarian. "To thine own self be true," in Polonius's philosophy as well as in Franklin's, might be interpreted to mean "Look out for number one!" whether it applied to a man, a city, or a nation. Even virtue must be made to "pay." Franklin thought that by making men thrifty and contented you make them virtuous. That is good material philosophy, but it is neither very inspiring nor in the long run very satisfying. The worldly-wise old philanthropist was not an idealist. He belonged to a century that did not greatly trouble itself about spiritual values; he was in temper a classicist and not a romanticist; he had the positive attitude of mind, the prosaic temperament, though happily relieved by humor, of the eighteenth century, that chilly, self-complacent period of prose and reason in literature. The spiritual element was not in him. The sturdiness and balance of his character, however, strongly appeal to the popular mind; and though he was lacking in those ideal qualities of sentiment and imagination which arouse the highest enthusiasm, his honesty, his democratic simplicity, and his cool common sense, are virtues which command our respect and admiration.