n the
colonies" learned from English authors what high intellectual merit
there was in being close to the center. "Your authors know but little of
the fame they have on this side of the ocean," Franklin assured William
Strahan when he wrote to order six sets of a new edition of Pope's
works. The four thousand volumes at Westover, or the books in Governor
Hutchinson's Boston house, would have given any cultivated Englishman a
reputation for good taste and discriminating judgment. Colonel Byrd
could as readily as Voltaire detect in the fantastic beliefs of an
American savage "the three great articles of Natural Religion." We find
the youthful Adams, who read Bolingbroke for his style and laboriously
copied out Berkeley and Tillotson, entering the lists of "moderns" to
defend the advantages of eighteenth-century Boston against those of Rome
in the age of Tully, renouncing, with the assurance of Locke, and with
some of his phrases, the outworn fallacy of innate ideas, and naively
confiding to his journal, after the manner of Diderot, that a man born
blind would have never a notion of color. Franklin was only the most
distinguished of those who read with pleasure the Queen Anne poets and
essayists, who learned in Tillotson that theology might be compatible
with reason and common sense, or in Shaftesbury that an enlightened
free-thinker might still be a gentleman and a man of virtue. Among the
cultivated and the well-bred it was no more than good form to open the
mind to all the tolerant liberalisms of the age; and no one in the
colonies lost caste who endeavored, in the manner if not in the
substance of his thinking, to achieve the polished urbanity of those
Englishmen who made a point of being scholars without a touch of
pedantry, and men of virtue without the taint of prejudice.

Yet few of these emancipated citizens of the world had permitted the
dissolvent philosophy of the century to enter the very pith and fiber of
their mental quality. For the rich and the well-born it was rather an
imported fashion, an attractive drapery laid over the surface of minds
that were conventional down to the ground, the modish mental recreation
of men who lived by custom and guided their steps in the well-worn paths
of precedent. In America, as in England, as in France, itself, the
formulae of radicalism were well pronounced by many whose hearts grew
faint at the first rude contact with the thing itself. And of all the
phrases of that age,