Sir Robert's Norfolk farm, and the wines in his cellar,
and the offices at his disposal--these are very real indeed. London
merchants are making money; the squire and the parson are tranquilly
ruling the country parishes; the philosophy of John Locke is everywhere
triumphant. Mr. Pope is the poet of the hour, and his "Essay on Man,"
counseling acceptance of our mortal situation, is considered to be the
last word of human wisdom and of poetical elegance. In prose, the style
of the "Spectator" rules--an admirable style, Franklin thought, and he
imitated it patiently until its ease and urbanity had become his own.
And indeed, how much of that London of the third decade of the century
passed into the mind of the inquisitive, roving, loose-living printer's
apprentice from Philadelphia! It taught him that the tangible world is
the real world, and that nothing succeeds like success; but it never
even whispered to him that sometimes nothing damns like success.

In his limitations, no less than in his power of assimilation, Franklin
was the representative man of his era. He had no artistic interests, no
liking for metaphysics after his brief devotion, in early manhood, to
the dialogues of Plato. He taught himself some Latin, but he came to
believe that the classics had little significance and that they should
be superseded by the modern languages. For the mediaeval world he had no
patience or understanding. To these defects of his century we must
add some failings of his own. He was not always truthful. He had an
indelible streak of coarseness. His conception of the "art of virtue"
was mechanical. When Carlyle called Franklin the "father of all the
Yankees," we must remember that the Scotch prophet hated Yankees and
believed that Franklin's smooth, plausible, trader type of morality was
only a broad way to the everlasting bonfire.

But it is folly to linger over the limitations of the tallow-chandler's
son. The catalogue of his beneficent activity is a vast one. Balzac once
characterized him as the man who invented the lightning-rod, the
hoax, and the republic. His contributions to science have to do with
electricity, earthquakes, geology, meteorology, physics, chemistry,
astronomy, mathematics, navigation of air and water, agriculture,
medicine, and hygiene. In some of these fields he did pioneer work
of lasting significance. His teachings of thrift and prudence, as
formulated in the maxims of Poor Richard, gave him a world-wid