LIFE AND TIMES OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.

CHAPTER I.

ANCESTORS OF FRANKLIN.

THE ancestors of the two men who were most influential upon the early fortunes of the United States lived, for several generations, in the same county, Northamptonshire, the central county of England. But though the two families lived within a few miles of each other, they were separated by a social interval that was impassable. Washington, as Mr. Irving, with such fond minuteness, relates, was of gentle lineage. Knights, abbots, lords of the manor, valiant defenders of cities and partakers of the spoils of conquest, bore the name of Washington, whose deeds and honors are recorded in ancient parchment, upon memorial brass and monumental stone. Franklin, on the contrary, came of a long line of village blacksmiths. A Franklin may have tightened a rivet in the armor, or replaced a shoe upon the horse, of a Washington, or doffed his cap to a Washington riding past the ancestral forge; but, until Postmaster Franklin met Colonel Washington in the camp of General Braddock, in 1755, the two races had run their several ways without communion.

The Franklins lived at Ecton, a small parish on the great northern turnpike, sixty-six miles from London. The little village, we are told by one of its parish priests, lies upon a gentle, verdant slope, which overlooks an English rural paradise. A quarter of a mile from the village, in both directions, the turnpike becomes an avenue of venerable elms, which shade not the road only, but a wide grassy plain as well, that serves the villagers for promenade

and play-ground.* Picturesque glimpses of the tall tower of the ancient church are caught through the branches of the trees, and the village is gradually disclosed. Along this shaded road crept the huge eight-horse wains that were three weeks in going from London to Edinburgh, stopping at the shop of the village smith to have their wheels greased-a work which only the blacksmiths of the olden time were capable of performing, and which, as it had to be frequently repeated, was an important source of their income.t Persons still living remember the time when the inventions which enable a vehicle to go all day without stopping at the blacksmith's shop for that purpose, caused a general alarm in the trade. "The blacksmiths will all be ruined!" was the cry. But this was long after the Franklins had ceased to ply their hereditary vocation at the roadside in Ecton.

In other particulars, the blacksmiths of two hundred years ago must have differed from those of the present time. Sheffield, Birmingham, and a few other manufacturing towns now make the greater part of the iron utensils used in the world. When the ancestors of Franklin wielded the hammer, the village smith must have supplied his neighborhood with most of the iron-work required in it, and the trade must have had a rank and importance among mechanical employments which it does not now enjoy. The smith must have been very frequently called upon to invent as well as execute. He was probably the first mechanic in his parish; his shop a centre of parish gossip. Hugh Miller, writing of the Scotland of his childhood, where old customs lingered long after their extinction in England, draws a picture of a country blacksmith which might stand for a veritable portrait of one of those silent, sagacious, brawny Franklins from whom our great printer descended.

"A village smith," he says, "hears well-nigh as much gossip as a village barber; but he develops into quite a different sort of man. He is not bound to please his customers by his talk; nor does his profession leave his breath free enough to talk fluently or much; and so he listens in grim and swarthy independence-strikes his iron while it is hot-and when, after thrusting it into the fire, he

"History and Antiquities of Ecton," by Rev. John Cole, p. 2.

+ The established charge for greasing the wheels of a large wagon or coach was 3s. 6d.

bends himself to the bellows, he drops, in rude phrase, a brief, judicial remark, and again falls steadily to work."*

Was it so that Dr. Franklin gained his unequaled power of holding his tongue? Was it from his grimy progenitors that he inherited that mastery over himself which led Mr. Bancroft to remark, that he never spoke a word too soon, nor a word too late, nor a word too much, nor failed to speak the right word at the right season?

On the lower outskirt of sequestered, umbrageous Ecton, the Franklins possessed, for three hundred years or more, a farm of thirty acres, a small stone dwelling-house, and a forge, all of which the eldest son regularly inherited, as far back as we have any knowledge of the family. The little farm not sufficing for the support of a household, it was a custom in the family for the heir of the estate to learn the trade of a blacksmith, and to take his youngest brother as an apprentice. All the other sons were apprenticed to trades; the daughters married tradesmen or farmers; and, during the whole period of three centuries, only one of the family raised himself above the rank in which he was born.

A conjecture has been made respecting the remoter origin of the family, which deserves mention only because it derives probability from Benjamin Franklin's peculiar cast of character. The word Franklin, as we learn from Chaucer and Spenser, meant freeholder, and was frequently used in the sense of country gentleman.† The name, besides being of French origin, was a common one in France as well as in England, and particularly common in Picardy, whence, during the times of persecution, many Protestants fled to England. From one of these refugees, it is thought, the Franklins may have descended; and there came a time when several Fran

* Hugh Miller's "My Schools and Schoolmasters," chap. ix.

quelins of France were eager in claiming relationship with the most eminent name in Europe. Franklin certainly exhibited French traits of character. That sprightliness of mind which he possessed, that mixture of gayety and prudence, of fancy and good sense, has frequently resulted from the union of the two races. The mother of Sydney Smith was the daughter of a French refugee; and who so like Franklin as Sydney Smith? The grandfather of Garrick was a Frenchman; and in Garrick were curiously blended extreme vivacity and extreme caution. Gayety of mind and brilliancy of utterance are not English qualities; somewhere in the pedigree of the Englishman who has them, may generally be found a French or Irish ancestor. It has not been often remarked, but it is true, that the Frenchman, with all his liveliness, and dash, is a very prudent person, excelled by no man in the art of making the most of small means. Our Franklin, then, may have inherited with his solid English traits, an infusion of vivifying Celtic blood.

Be that as it may, these Franklins of Northamptonshire were a strong-armed, long-lived, prolific, steadfast, and cheerful race. There was also a lurking talent in the family, which seemed to gain force in the later generations.

Our Benjamin Franklin, himself a youngest son, was descended from a line of four youngest sons, respecting each of whom we have a little trustworthy information, derived principally from a letter written, in his old age, by Josiah Franklin to his son Benjamin, and partly from Benjamin's autobiography and letters. All of them were blacksmiths, except his father, Josiah, who learned the trade of a dyer. We have one glimpse of an ancient Franklin, the great-great-great-grandfather of Benjamin, who wielded the sledgehammer in the reign of Henry VIII., when Lawrence Washington was Mayor of Northampton. This ancient personage, when he was a wellgrown lad, left his father's house at Ecton, and, according to a custom of that age, went forth to seek his fortune, i. e., to learn a trade. He stopped first at the house of "a tailor," with whom he engaged to stay "upon liking." But this tailor, wrote Josiah Franklin, "kept such a stingy house that the boy left him and traveled farther." Next, he came to the house of a smith; "and coming on a fasting day, being in popish times, he did not like it there the first day; the next morning, the servant was called up at five, but after a little time came a good toast and good beer, and he found good house

keeping there; he staid and learned the trade of a smith." And there ends the history of this adventurous youth.

Of his youngest son (Benjamin's great-great-grandfather), we know only that, in the days of Bloody Mary, he was a Protestant; which is not an insignificant fact. For, as it is only the best races that have the force of intelligence requisite to throw off ancient superstition, so it is the best specimens of the best races that are able to do so first. This worthy Franklin was he who kept his Bible tied open with tape under the lid of a stool. When he read it to his family, one of the children was stationed at the door to give notice of the approach of the official spy. When the alarm was given, the forbidden book was concealed by closing the lid and putting the stool in its place. Like Montaigne, he would "follow the right cause to the fire, but without the fire if he could." There was a tradition in the family, that a daughter of this wary Protestant slily stole the commission of one of the violent persecutors from his saddle-bags, and put a pack of cards in its tin case; upon producing which, to justify and announce his proceedings, the savage priest was discomfited.

The youngest son of this dextrous Bible-reader (the great-grandfather of Benjamin) lived in less perilous times, but, being less wary than his father, got into trouble. Of him we are told that he was imprisoned for a year and a day, "on suspicion of his being the author of some poetry that touched the character of some great man."

Thomas, the son of this imprisoned Franklin, and the grandfather of our Benjamin, was a man of peculiar worth, happy in his circumstances and in his children, as they were in their pa rents. "There were nine children of us," writes his son Josiah, "who were very happy in our parents, who took great care by their instructions and pious example to breed us in a religious way." Another of his sons (our Benjamin's good Uncle Benjamin, of whom more anon), when he was an old man in Boston, wrote in one of his poetry books, still in existence, three entries respecting his father, which I will here transcribe:

1.

"MY FATHER'S BIRTH-PLACE AGE & DEATH.

"Tho: Franklin was born at Ecton in Northamptonshire on 8 day of Oct, 1598. He married Mrs. Jane White Neece to Coll: White