s we can even forgive him for that attack upon the Mathers which
threw the conduct of the "Courant," for a brief period, into the hands
of his brother Benjamin, whose turn at a London apprenticeship was soon
to come.

* Cook, E. C. "Literary Influences in Colonial Newspapers,
1704-1750." N. Y., 1912.

If we follow this younger brother to Philadelphia and to Bradford's
"American Mercury" or to Franklin's own "Pennsylvania Gazette," or if
we study the "Gazettes" of Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, the
impression is still the same. The literary news is still chiefly from
London, from two months to a year late. London books are imported
and reprinted. Franklin reprints Pamela, and his Library Company of
Philadelphia has two copies of "Paradise Lost" for circulation in 1741,
whereas there had been no copy of that work in the great library of
Cotton Mather. American journalism then, as now, owed its vitality to a
secular spirit of curiosity about the actual world. It followed England
as its model, but it was beginning to develop a temper of its own.

Colonial education and colonial science were likewise chiefly indebted
to London, but by 1751 Franklin's papers on electricity began to repay
the loan. A university club in New York in 1745 could have had but
fifteen members at most, for these were all the "academics" in town.
Yet Harvard had then been sending forth her graduates for more than a
century. William and Mary was founded in 1693, Yale in 1701, Princeton
in 1746, King's (now Columbia) in 1754, the University of Pennsylvania
in 1755, and Brown in 1764. These colonial colleges were mainly in the
hands of clergymen. They tended to reproduce a type of scholarship based
upon the ancient languages. The curriculum varied but little in the
different colonies, and this fact helped to produce a feeling of
fellowship among all members of the republic of letters. The men who
debated the Stamp Act were, with a few striking exceptions, men trained
in Latin and Greek, familiar with the great outlines of human history,
accustomed to the discipline of academic disputation. They knew the
ideas and the vocabulary of cultivated Europe and were conscious of no
provincial inferiority. In the study of the physical sciences, likewise,
the colonials were but little behind the mother country. The Royal
Society had its distinguished members here. The Mathers, the Dudleys,
John Winthrop of Connecticut, John Bartram, James Logan