and scarcely an allusion to the Puritan poet Milton, and that the
Harvard College Library in 1723 had nothing of Addison, Steele,
Bolingbroke, Dryden, Pope, and Swift, and had only recently
obtained copies of Milton and Shakespeare, we can appreciate the
value of James Franklin's apprenticeship in London. Perhaps 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