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little significance and that they should be superseded by the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,