was never sick, and I give it as another instance on how small an income life and health may be supported." He met with another religious eccentric, a printer's widow, Mrs. Hive, who believed that this present world is hell, and its inhabitants spirits who are expiating sins committed in a previous state of existence, of which they retain no recollection. After death, she thought, the knowledge of our former state returned to us, and the recollection of the punishment we had endured in hell, had the two-fold effect of keeping us virtuous and deterring others from vice. The good lady attached so much importance to her singular creed, that she bound her son to deliver, in a public hall, a solemn discourse in which the doctrine should be set forth and vindicated. The discourse was delivered; and Franklin, years after, saw a copy of it in print, abounding in citations from the Bible. During the latter part of Franklin's stay in London, he is said, but not on the best authority,* to have formed the acquaintance of Peter Collinson, a young man of fortune, devoted to natural science. Collinson may have heard of the young American through Sir Hans Sloane, whose collection he was in the habit of visiting.f He is said to have sought out Franklin at Watt's printing-house, and to have become warmly attached to him. Be that as it may, Franklin and Collinson, as we know, were correspondents and friends from 1730 to the death of Collinson, in 1768. One of Franklin's fellow-workmen at Watt's printing-house, was David Hall, who was afterwards his partner in Philadelphia for many years. Another named Wygate, a man of considerable education, was his frequent companion. He taught Wygate and a friend of his to swim in two lessons, an incident that came near diverting him from his proper career. Joining a party of Wygate's friends from the country, who were going to visit Chelsea, he was entreated, as they were returning by water, to give the company an exhibition of his feats in swimming. Chelsea, which has now run into huge London, was then a pretty country village, four miles and a half from St. Paul's. Franklin, seldom reluctant to take to the water, stripped, leaped in, performed all the tricks he knew, and swam without resting from near Chelsea to Blackfriars, a distance of four miles. He had long ago exhausted the science of swimming Weems's Life of Franklin, chap. xxxv, + Encyclopædia Britannica, vil. 184. he could do all that was possible both on the water and under the water. The company were amazed at his skill and endurance, and Wygate conceived such a fondness for him, that he proposed they should make the tour of Europe together, supporting themselves everywhere by their trade. Bayard Taylor anticipated. At first he was inclined to embrace the proposition, and mentioned it to Mr. Denham, with whom he had maintained an acquaintance ever since they had landed from the London-Hope together. Mr. Denham did more than dissuade him. He urged him to think only of returning to Pennsylvania, which he was himself about to do, with a great cargo of merchandise. This Mr. Denham was one of those merchants whose scrupulous honesty first rescued the name of merchant from opprobrium, and gradually made it honorable throughout Christendom. After failing in business at Bristol, he emigrated to America, where, in a few years, he gained a large fortune. He returned to England, as we have seen, and on reaching Bristol, invited all his old creditors to dinner. Before going to the table, he made them a little address, in which he thanked them for the easy composition with which they had favored him after his bankruptcy. At the end of the first course, when the plates were removed, every man found before him a check for the amount still due him, with interest added. He was now about to resume his business in America. He offered Franklin the place of clerk and book-keeper in the extensive store which he proposed to open in Philadelphia. The salary of the place, fifty pounds a year, was less than the wages Franklin was then earning as a compositor. But Denham engaged, as soon as the young man should have become acquainted with mercantile business, to send him with a cargo to the West Indies, and procure him commissions from other merchants and in other ways assist him to get into business for himself. Franklin was tired of London and dissatisfied with the life he had led there. Often had he recalled with pleasure the innocent and happy months he had passed in Philadelphia, and had often longed to revisit those pleasant scenes. He accepted Mr. Denham's offer. He took leave of the printing-house, as he supposed, forever, and was occupied, day after day, in packing and forwarding mer chandise. When all had been stowed on board the ship, some days still remained before the time fixed for her departure. On one of these days, he was surprised to receive a request to visit Sir William Wyndham, a man of great celebrity at that time from his having been Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Bolingbroke administration, and a sharer in the persecutions of his brilliant chief. He waited upon the great man. Sir William told him that he had heard of his swimming from Chelsea to Blackfriars, and also of his having taught the two young men to swim in a few hours. He said that he had two sons about to set out on their travels, who, he wished, should be taught to swim before starting, and if Franklin would teach them, he would pay him liberally for his trouble. Greatly to his regret, he was compelled to decline the offer, as the young men had not yet come to town, and his own stay was uncertain. He was so struck with the incident, that he thought if the proposal had been made to him before he had engaged himself to Mr. Denham, he should have remained in England and opened a swimming school. It thus appears, that he had not, at this time, a preference for any particular career. He was perfectly aware that saving money is the mode by which journeymen become masters, and his scheme of life was simply to get on and be a prosperous citizen. And it is to be observed of all the men who have rendered signal and immeasurable services to mankind-such men, for example, as Shakspeare, Newton, Handel, James Watt, Robert Fulton, and John Walterhave never indulged the flattering delusion of having a grand aim. They have taken hold of their tasks in the most simple and ordinary fashion, and been actuated by the most simple and ordinary motives. Shakspeare appears to have cared chiefly to fill the Globe Theater; Newton, to do his duty as professor of mathematics, and keep out of controversies; Watt, to establish a great machine factory; Walter, to sell the Times newspaper by thousands, instead of hundreds; Handel, to gain an honest living by composing music and playing the organ. It really appears to be only second-rate men who have great aims. The truly able and wise person seems only to do, in a superior and original manner, the duties that fall in his way, or that belong to his vocation. He glorifies the common lot. He does sublime things merely in the way of earning his livelihood, or by way of recreation after he has done work. And when we consider what life may be to a man, and is to all men who have learned how to live, we are inclined to question whether a motive more truly lofty is possible than this: to earn one's living. the gift of life? universe a loser! Who can do more than requite the universe for No man. July 21st, 1726, Franklin embarked on board the ship Berkshire, Henry Clark, master, bound for Philadelphia. In London he had lived for a year and a half. He had not improved his fortune, but he had acquired skill in his trade, and had increased his knowledge, both of books and of the world. He had met some distinguished, and several ingenious men, whose conversation had been beneficial to him, as well as pleasing. A journeyman printer in populous London, a stranger, too, in a strange land, we still see that he tended strongly upward, by a law which we must not say is as sure as gravitation, because it is gravitation. If he had stayed in London, he would have been a leading publisher and member of Parliament before he was forty-five, like his friend William Strahan, who also began as a journeyman printer. Franklin was on the direct road to both those distinctions when he joined Mr. Denham. His valued acquaintance, Peter Collinson, accompanied him on board the ship, we are told. At parting, they are said to have exchanged walking sticks, and promises to correspond.* CHAPTER XII. THE VOYAGE HOME. THE Berkshire was eighty-two days in getting from London to Philadelphia. The passage was called a long one, but it was not long enough to excite particular remark at that day. What with the slowness of the ship, the delays in the channel, the danger of being blown down across the Bay of Biscay, the liability of being chased by pirates in time of peace, and by privateers in time of war, and the frequent necessity of running into a port for repairs, it was not very uncommon for vessels to be three, five, seven months in making the passage from Europe to America. There is one passage of eleven months on record, five of which were spent in a Spanish port repairing damages. The Berkshire appears to have been a *Weems's Life of Franklin, chap. xxxv. small ship, or, in other words, to have been a ship of about two hundred tons, instead of three hundred and fifty or four hundred. If we may judge from the pictures of ships that have been preserved from that period in the Philadelphia Library, we may conclude that the good ship Berkshire bore a much closer resemblance to a Chinese junk than to a Philadelphia packet of the present time. Captain, passengers, and crew, numbered twenty-one men. * A sea-voyage was, indeed, a most formidable affair, a hundred and thirty years ago. I have stumbled upon a few particulars, which may be interesting to some readers. The familiar distinction between cabin passengers and steerage passengers dates only from the time when poor people and bought servants began to emigrate to America; say, about the year 1700. The Pilgrim Fathers, William Penn, Benjamin Franklin, and the great host of respectable passengers, from 1620 to 1775, appear to have paid about five pounds each as passage-money, which entitled a passenger to sailors' fare of salt beef and biscuit. All other stores were either provided by the passengers, or furnished by the captain, at a price agreed upon. But Franklin, in his well-known article on the subject, warns the inexperienced voyager to put no trust in captains; but to lay in a supply of bottled water, tea, coffee, wine, sugar, raisins, eggs, rum, biscuit, and cooking utensils. The passengers were sometimes divided into messes of four each, who clubbed their stores, and made common cause against the ravages of the cook, who was always the worst sailor in the ship, and had been transferred from the forecastle to the galley for that sole reason. As late as 1784, Mrs. Adams could still describe her sea-cook as a great, dirty, lazy negro, with no more knowledge of cooking than a savage." "On came the dishes," she adds, "higgledy-piggledy, with a leg of pork all bristly; a quarter of an hour af a pudding, or, perhaps, a pair of roast fowls; when dinner completed, a plate of potatoes." Dr. Johnson's ab' ship-board, which has been often set down as one of judices, was not so very unreasonable. "A shi 66 "is worse than a jail: there is in a jail better better conveniences of every kind, and a 106. "Precautions to be used by those who are about t + Letters of Mrs. John Adams, ii., 14. |