Washington gentry may often have stopped at Ecton to
have their horses shod at the Franklin smithy. Benjamin's father came
out in 1685, more than fifty years after the most notable Puritan
emigration. Young Benjamin, born in 1706, was as untouched by the
ardors of that elder generation as he would have been by the visions of
Dante--an author, by the way, whom he never mentions, even as he never
mentions Shakespeare. He had no reverence for Puritan New England. To
its moral beauty, its fine severity, he was wholly blind. As a boy he
thriftily sold his Pilgrim's "Progress." He became, in the new fashion
of that day, a Deist. Like a true child of the eighteenth century,
his attitude toward the seventeenth was that of amused or contemptuous
superiority. Thackeray has somewhere a charming phrase about his own
love for the back seat of the stage-coach, the seat which, in the old
coaching days, gave one a view of the receding landscape. Thackeray,
like Burke before him, loved historical associations, historical
sentiment, the backward look over the long road which humanity has
traveled. But Franklin faced the other way. He would have endorsed his
friend Jefferson's scornful sentence, "The dead have no rights." He
joined himself wholly to that eighteenth century in which his own lot
was cast, and, alike in his qualities and in his defects, he became one
of its most perfect representatives.

To catch the full spirit of that age, turn for an instant to the London
of 1724--the year of Franklin's arrival. Thirty-six years have elapsed
since the glorious Revolution of 1688; the Whig principles, then
triumphant, have been tacitly accepted by both political parties; the
Jacobite revolt of 1715 has proved a fiasco; the country has accepted
the House of Hanover and a government by party leadership of the House
of Commons, and it does not care whether Sir Robert Walpole buys a
few rotten boroughs, so long as he maintains peace with Europe
and prosperity at home. England is weary of seventeenth century
"enthusiasm," weary of conflict, sick of idealism. She has found in the
accepted Whig principles a satisfactory compromise, a working theory of
society, a modus vivendi which nobody supposes is perfect but which will
answer the prayer appointed to be read in all the churches, "Grant us
peace in our time, O Lord." The theories to which men gave their lives
in the seventeenth century seem ghostly in their unreality; but the
prize turnips on