was a
stock classical allusion. We do not believe--for Dante and Milton would
rise up in judgment against us, even if the vast majority of other great
men did not--that "it is only second-rate men who have great aims." We
do not believe that the style of the "Spectator" is an "easily imitated
style"; for, of the hundreds who have tried, how many, besides Franklin,
have really succeeded in imitating it? We do not believe that Latin and
Greek are an "obstructing nuisance," or that the student of Homer and
Thucydides and Demosthenes and Plato and Aristotle and Caesar and Cicero
and Tacitus is merely studying "the prattle of infant man," or "adding
the ignorance of the ancients to the ignorance he was born with." We
believe, on the contrary, that it was by such studies that Gibbon and
Niebuhr and Arnold and Grote acquired their marvellous power of
discovering historical truth and detecting historical error, and that
from no modern language could they have received such discipline.

But we not only agree with the sentiment, but admire the simple energy
of the expression, when he says that "Franklin was the man of all others
then alive who possessed in the greatest perfection the four grand
requisites for the successful observation of Nature or the pursuit of
literature,--a sound and great understanding, patience, dexterity, and
an independent income." Equally judicious and equally well-expressed is
the following passage upon the Penns:--"Thomas Penn was a man of
business, careful, saving, and methodical. Richard Penn was a
spendthrift. Both were men of slender abilities, and not of very
estimable character. They had done some liberal acts for the Province,
such as sending over presents to the Library of books and apparatus, and
cannon for the defence of Philadelphia. If the Pennsylvanians had been
more submissive, they would doubtless have continued their benefactions.
But, unhappily, they cherished those erroneous, those Tory notions of
the rights of sovereignty which Lord Bute infused into the contracted
mind of George III., and which cost that dull and obstinate monarch,
first, his colonies, and then his senses. It is also rooted in the
British mind, that a landholder is entitled to the particular respect of
his species. These Penns, in addition to the pride of possessing acres
by the million, felt themselves to be the lords of the land they owned,
and of the people who dwelt upon it." And in speaking of English ideas
of