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 Sir