cation, and were advised by wise and able men, friends of America, whose names it will not be proper to mention, by no means to publish it till it should be before Parliament, as it would be deemed disrespectful to the king. We flattered ourselves, from the answer given by Lord Dartmouth, that the king would have been pleased to recommend it to the consideration of Parliament by some message; but we were mistaken. It came down among a great heap of letters of intelligence from governors and officers in America, newspapers, pamphlets, and handbills, from that country, the last in the list, and was laid upon the table with them, undistinguished by any particular recommendation of it to the notice of either House."

"Peti

It remained unnoticed for several days. To compel attention to it, the three gentlemen asked to be heard on the subject by counsel at the bar of the House of Commons. The request was refused. The petition became at length the topic of debate, when it was assailed with contemptuous violence by the tory orators, and dismissed from further consideration by an immense majority. tions," wrote Franklin, "are odious here, and petitioning is far from being a probable means of obtaining redress." Nothing could exceed the vulgarity of the abuse which some of the ministerial leaders heaped upon the colonists in this debate. They spoke of the Americans with just that curious blending of bitterness and scorn with which southern plantationists, in these modern days, are wont to amuse us when they discourse on northern men and things. Lord Sandwich said that the colonists were such arrant cowards that the more there were of them the more easily they would be defeated; the very sound of a cannon would scatter them. This is quite in the plantation style. The same spirit—the same object— the same language.

While Dr. Franklin, in December, 1774, was busied about the petitions, a melancholy scene was transpiring at his home in Philadelphia. His fond and faithful wife was dying. She had attained nearly to the age of threescore and ten, and still enjoyed good health; her old age cheered by her daughter, and her grandchildren. But she longed continually for the return of her husband, now ten years absent from her, and yet every summer expected. She had said at the beginning of the year, that if her husband did not return in the autumn, she should never see him again. A paralytic stroke

hastened her departure; she lingered five days, scarcely conscious, and died without a struggle or a groan. Governor Franklin came from the capital of his province to follow her remains to the grave; himself and Mr. Bache being the chief mourners. The coffin was borne by some of Dr. Franklin's oldest friends, who had known him when, fifty-four years before, he and his young wife began housekeeping in the printing house, and ate their breakfast of bread and milk from bowls of delf. A large concourse of citizens followed the corpse to its resting place in the burial-ground of Christ Church; where lay the dust of her father, her mother, and her infant son.

In the varied circumstances of their lot, in a lowly station and in a high one, she had been a faithful and able helpmeet to her husband. She assisted him to acquire the priceless possession of leisure, and, then, by wisely administering his fortune, enabled him to devote that leisure to the pursuit of science and the service of his country. It is mournful to think that, for so many years, she should have been deprived of her husband's society. The very qualities which made her so good a wife, rendered it possible for him to remain absent from his affairs. She lost her husband by deserving him.

That Franklin was constantly sensible of her worth, and of his obligations to her, his and her letters equally attest. They exchanged letters and gifts by every ship; but the fine apparel which he sent her she kept to wear after his return, saying that she could not find it in her heart to go gayly dressed while her husband was away. He made friends for her in England, who joined him in endeavoring to overcome her repugnance to the sea. A sea voyage at that time, when the smallness of the ships made privacy on board almost impossible, was terrible indeed to ladies, and they seldom crossed the ocean except from necessity. Dr. Franklin, too, was always on the point of returning. There was no spring, during the whole of his ten years' absence, when he did not expect to go home before the autumn, and no autumn in which he did not count upon setting sail in the spring. And so it was, that their parting in 1765 for a few months' separation, proved a separation for ever.

The Governor of New Jersey, in the letter which communicated the sad intelligence, entreated his father to lose no time in coming home. This letter shows how little Governor Franklin comprehended the state of things, and how widely father and son were

diverging. "If there was any prospect," wrote the governor, "of your being able to bring the people in power to your way of thinking, or those of your way of thinking being brought into power, I should not think so much of your stay. But as you have had by this time pretty strong proofs that neither can be reasonably expected, and that you are looked upon with an evil eye in that country, and are in no small danger of being brought into trouble for your political conduct, you had certainly better return while you are able to bear the fatigues of the voyage, to a country where the people revere you, and are inclined to pay a deference to your opinions. I wonder none of them, as you say, requested your attendance at the late Congress, for I heard from all quarters that your return was ardently wished for at that time, and I have since heard it lamented by many that you were not at that meeting; as they imagined, had you been there, you would have framed some plan for an accommodation of our differences that would have met with the approbation of a majority of the delegates, though it would not have coincided with the deep designs of those who influenced that majority. However mad you may think the measures of the ministry are, yet I trust you have candor enough to acknowledge that we are no ways behindhand with them in madness on this side of the water. However, it is a disagreeable subject, and I'll drop it."* In the same letter he expresses a wish to have his son, William Temple Franklin, bred to the law, and sent to King's College at New York for a year or two. That young gentleman still lived with his grandfather in London, and was beginning to be useful to him as his secretary. The governor concluded by saying, that he was very happily settled in a very good house at Perth Amboy, where he hoped to see both his father and his son in the spring, and where an apartment should always be at his father's service. It was very far from William Franklin's anticipations, that his father's mad friends would be under the necessity, by and by, of providing an apartment for the last royal governor of New Jersey.

CHAPTER XI.

DR. FRANKLIN AND LORD CHATHAM.

THE Earl of Chatham came forward at this crisis to attempt to save England her American colonies. Aged and infirm, long withdrawn from official life, attached to no party, and out of favor at court, he was still the greatest name in England. He was, indeed, a great man, but great after an antique pattern. From the utterances of ruling spirits we can frequently select a single word, or phrase, which seems to contain a summary of their policy or their character. In discoursing of the leading nations of the historic world, Lord Chatham, with lofty mien and imperial gesture, would speak of them as MASTER-STATES: an expression which revealed what he chiefly wished for England. It is now confessed that a policy founded upon such an aim is barbarous and heathen, worthy of pagan Rome, or of dissolute France under Louis XIV., but not of modern, industrial, Christian England. For if there are masterstates, there must be subject-states also; and it is now an admitted, fundamental truth of statesmanship, that no nation gains any thing by another nation's loss or degradation. As it is every man's interest that every other man should be prosperous and happy, so it is the interest of every nation that every other nation should be great, flourishing, and satisfied.

Lord Chatham had fed his growing country with victories; which is like bringing up a bull-dog upon blood. Those victories, necessary at the time, inflamed the pride of the English people, and helped to render them capable of sustaining George III. against America. Lord Chatham, also, had a strange weakness with regard to the king and the king's closet; he seemed spell-bound in the presence of the monarch, and addressed him as though he really was the vicegerent of God. His letters to the king teem with expressions which read to us like the most abject flattery, but which he considered merely as the "technical respect due to royalty." Unhappily, George III. was not man enough to take such language in a technical sense. I suppose that Lord Chatham's extreme respect for a king was owing, not to any thing servile in his mind, but merely to the power of his imagination, which often tyrannized over him, and "carried him away."

Nevertheless, he was a great, brilliant, noble being, who hated injustice, meanness, and blundering; a true, though elder brother of the wiser men his country has since produced. He was not more illustrious in the Senate than he was amiable at his home. No one can read his family letters without loving his memory.

From first to last, he opposed the king's mad policy respecting America. When the Stamp Act was about to be repealed, as he was so debilitated by his disease, that he could not stand to speak, he asked and received permission to speak sitting; and remained in the House all night, till the vote was taken which decided the question. In 1770, when the bloody affray took place in Boston between the citizens and the troops, he felt that the colonies were lost unless the king receded. He wondered if "this wretched island was still to be called by the once respected name of England." "I think," he wrote to Lord Shelburne, "all is ruined, and I am determined to be found at my post when destruction falls upon us. The times are pollution in the very quintessence." Again: "I think the infatuation of St. James unexampled, and I look upon the day of destruction as near at hand." The labors of Franklin and his friends, in these years, had his warm approval. In 1773, he wrote to Lord Shelburne: "Mr. Franklin's preface (to the Boston pamphlet) is important, considering the sobriety and worthiness of that gentleman's character." *** "I am charmed and edified by the sermon on America, preached by the Bishop of St. Asaph. This noble discourse speaks the preacher, not only fit to bear rule in the church, but in the State; indeed, it does honor to the right-reverend bench."

In August. 1774, the Earl of Chatham, whose presence Franklin had vainly striven to reach fourteen years before, sought an interview with Franklin for the purpose of consulting him upon American affairs. The Earl then lived at Hayes in Kent, two hours' ride from London. He called upon Dr. Franklin, who was visiting a friend's house in the neighborhood, and took him home in his carriage. Of the interview which followed, Dr. Franklin has left us a particular and interesting account:

"That truly great man," he wrote, "received me with abundance of civility, inquired particularly into the situation of affairs in America, spoke feelingly of the severity of the late laws against the Massachusetts, gave me some account of his speech in opposing