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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Benjamin Franklin was always, to quote Carl Van Doren, “an avid, powerful reader of many books. There were always books in his inner life, books in his business, books in his friendships.” His effective initiative in the organization and development of the Junto's subscription library, later the Philadelphia Library, is one conspicuous illustration of this life-long habit of his mind and heart; but every reader of the Autobiography knows that, besides providing books for others, Franklin used them in his own writing, early and late. Witness the memorable passages in which he recalls his self-imposed “exercises” in “improving my language”—not to mention Alexander Pope's—by “imitating” The Spectator or the Essay on Criticism, and digesting Locke, Shaftesbury, and others. In this note I wish to call particular attention to a hitherto unnoticed by-product of Franklin's “bookish inclination,” a recollection from a notable Elizabethan poet.
1 Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1938), p. 104.
2 Autobiography, in Writings of Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1907), ed. A. H. Smyth (hereafter referred to as Writings), i, 241–245.
3 Ibid., i, 239.
4 Op. cit., p. 112.
5 “Franklin seems to have been acquainted with portions of Plato, Aesop, Pliny, Xenophon, Herodotus, Epictetus, Vergil, Horace, Tacitus, Seneca, Sallust, Cicero, Tully, Milton, Jeremy Taylor, Bacon, Dryden, Tillotson, Rabelais, Bunyan, Fenelon, Chevalier de Ramsay, Pythagoras, Waller, Defoe, Addison and Steele, William Temple, Pope, Swift, Voltaire, Boyle, Algernon Sidney, Trenchard and Gordon, Young, Mandeville, Locke, Shaftesbury, Collins, Bolingbroke, Richardson, Whiston, Watts, Thomson, Burke, Cowper, Darwin, Rowe, Rapin, Herschel, Payley, Lord Kames, Adam Smith, Hume, Robertson, Lavoisier, Buffon, Dupont de Nemours, Whitefield, Pemberton, Blackmore, John Ray, Petty, Turgot, Priestley, Paine, Mirabeau, Quesnay, Raynal, Morellet, and Condorcet, to suggest only the more prominent”—F. L. Mott and C. E. Jorgenson, Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1936), p. lv. On this subject see also W. C. Bruce, Benjamin Franklin Self-Revealed (New York, 1917), ii, 423 ff.
6 Mott and Jorgenson (see n. 5).
7 Cf. A. H. Bullen, Elizabethans (London, 1924), p. 206.
8 Writings, ii, 159–160; cf. Van Doren, p. 84.
9 Poems and Dramas of Pulke Greville, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (Edinburgh and London, 1939), ii, 136, 25 ff.—Mustapha, revised, appeared in the 1633 edition of Greville's Workes, but not thereafter until it was included in the first edition (1744, vol. ii) of Dodsley's Old Plays, fourteen years after Franklin's dialogues.
10 “With the poets, dramatists, novelists, and general men of letters,” says Mr. Van Doren (p. 292), Franklin “was little acquainted.” (But see also Mott and Jorgenson, op. cit., p. liv, n. 150.)
11 Cf. Van Doren, p. 83.
12 Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 5th ed. (London, 1732), ii, 299, 192.
13 Greville deals with the contradictions between Nature's “diverse laws”; Shaftesbury with her faulty workmanship: the weakness of mankind.
14 Cf. n. 5.
15 New York, 1939; pp. 102, 107.
16 Both Professor Dunn and Professor A. H. Thorndike (“Shakespeare in America,” Shakespeare Assn. Bulletin, 1928, iii, 2) observe that a copy of Shakespeare was among Franklin's books.
17 Quoted by Bruce, op. cit., ii, 517.
18 May 9, 1766 and May 4, 1799 (Writings, iv, 456; vii, 311).
19 Not Friar Bungay but Miles is the guilty servant in the play (pr. 1594, 1630, 1655), as well as in its source, The Famous Historie of Fryer Bacon (earliest extant ed. 1627). In both the play and the Historie not the servant but the two friars fall asleep. In the Historie, indeed, the servant is sufficiently wide-awake to sing sundry scurrilous songs of many stanzas “in scorne” of the Brazen Head (cf. Plays and Poems of Robert Greene, ed. J. C. Collins [Oxford, 1905], ii, 7–9; 62–63). The prolixities of the Historie are unlikely to have attracted Franklin. His concise version of the Brazen Head episode is relatively close to the play, though it may be that he got the story merely from one of the collections of “popular science” lore in his library. One recalls, however, that when Franklin was a young man in London (1725–1726), plays and the theatre were meat and drink to him and—more especially—to his bosom friend James Ralph, the poetaster and playwright. At this time Franklin spent “a great deal” of his “earnings in going to plays” with Ralph (Writings, i, 276–277). There is nothing to show that Friar Bacon was acted at the time, but one or the other of the friends might have read it in one of the later seventeenth-century copies. I find no mention of Greene—nor of Lyly or Fulke Greville—among the surviving records of Franklin's library, but “much remains to be discovered on the subject” (G. S. Eddy, “Dr. Benjamin Franklin's Library,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, N. S., 1924, xxxiv, 223).
20 Writings, ix, 61–62; Othello, iii, iii, 322. Mr. Howard Darrow of the University of Tennessee kindly traced this passage for me.
21 Writings, ii, 391; iii, 28–30.
22 Ibid., i, 240; Van Doren, p. 9.
23 Writings, ii, 21–25.
24 Writings, ii, 242; viii, 448.
25 Writings, ii, 96, 103; vii, 411 and passim.
26 Ibid., viii, 449.
27 Ibid., ii, 243.
28 Fuller Worthies, Works of Fulke Greville (1870), iii, 496.
29 Biographia Britannica, (n. d.), p. 2397.
30 Works of Dr. John Tillotson (Edinburgh, 1772), ii, 149–150.—According to Tillotson, the “degeneracy and corruption of human nature” was “occasioned by the voluntary transgression of a plain and easy command given by God to our first parents. And this weakness naturally descends upon us, their posterity.” Compare Fulke Greville: “Fye, foolish Earth, thinke you the heauen wants glory/ Because your shadowes doe your selfe be-night?” (“Caelica,” xvi and lxxxvi, Poems and Dramas—cf. n. 9 above—i, 81, 135, 11–12). Franklin resolves the contradiction upon principles of practical ethics. Not Nature but man's conduct is the issue. Says Philocles to Horatio: “What you find fault with … as the most terrible Evil in the World, Self-denial, is really the greatest Good … Self-denial is … a natural Means of procuring more Pleasure than you can taste without it” (Writings, ii, 161).
31 Writings, i, 239.
32 Ibid., ii, 13.
33 See above, n. 21.
34 Writings, vi, 34.