printer" established in Philadelphia, and second, that that printer should be young Franklin. But he was unfortunately given to making promises which he had not the ability to execute, and his imagination was so apt to run away with his judgment, that few persons who knew him placed much confidence in what he said in the way of patronage. His credit in England, moreover, was rather less than that of Franklin's himself.

But what could have induced him to think of placing a poor youth, whose friend he professed to be, in this unpleasant situation? Franklin says, after age had cooled his resentment, that "it was a habit he had acquired; he wished to please every body, and having but little to give, he gave expectations. He was, otherwise, an ingenious, sensible man, a pretty good writer, and a good Governor for the people, though, not for his constituents, the proprietaries, whose instructions he sometimes disregarded. Several of our best laws were of his planning, and passed during his administration.”

In accordance with the advice of some friends he had formed on the passage, he betook himself in these straits to his trade, and pretty soon found employment as a journeyman printer. For some time he continued to lead a free and easy sort of life with his boon companion Ralph, visiting such places of amusement as were within his reach, and trying to think, in the excitement of the great metropolis, as little of Philadelphia as possible. There was one tie, however, although not quite so indissoluble as that of Ralph's, that should have led his thoughts that way much oftener than they strayed thither. This was his young companion and faithful friend, Miss Reed, whose affections he had succeeded

ET. 18.]

NEGLECT OF MISS REED.

23

in attaching to himself, but to wring her young and ardent heart by a cold and cruel neglect.

Franklin, in speaking of this little episode, has managed most adroitly to divert from himself the odium of the transaction by the cool and business-like manner in which he relates it; but he has failed to tell us of the long and anxious hours of bitter suspense endured by the loving, hoping, confiding girl, whose purest and tenderest sympathies he had managed to intertwine, in a dream of future happiness, in which he formed the most prominent object, by his forgetfulness and failure to write. Once only during his sojourn in London did he write, and then to tell her that he did not soon expect to return. It is no wonder that after the receipt of this letter, more cold and cruel than the previous neglect, she should in a fit of desperation, have yielded to the urgent entreaty of her mother, and given herself in a marriage, in which her heart refused to second the words pronounced by her lips.

In the meantime, Franklin and Ralph were living together in London, upon the wages earned by the former, and in some respects not much to the credit of either. Ralph had succeeded in becoming very intimate with a young milliner who lodged in the house with them, to whom he was in the habit of reading plays, and finally ruined her. She left the house, Ralph followed her, and they continued to live together for some time on the means procured by her business, but at last finding it inadequate to their maintenance, Ralph left London to teach a small school, under the feigned name of Franklin, recommending the girl to Franklin's care. Her connexion with Ralph had ruined her business, alienated her

friends, blasted her hopes, and caused her frequently to be in distress for money. On these occasions, she often applied to Franklin for aid, which he did not hesitate to bestow in the shape of small loans.

"I grew fond," adds he, "of her company, and being at that time under no religious restraint, and taking advantage of my importance to her, I attempted to take some liberties with her, (another erratum) which she repulsed with a proper degree of resentment. She wrote to Ralph, and acquainted him with my conduct, which occasioned a breach between us; and when he returned to London he let me know he considered all the obligations he had been under to me as annulled, from which I concluded that I was never to expect his repaying me the money I had lent him, or that I had advanced for him."

The great fundamental error of Franklin's life thus far, was his precocious free-thinking sentiments. He tells us, that notwithstanding the strict Puritanical notions of his parents, and the religious maxims they strove to inculcate in him, he "was scarce fifteen, when, after doubting by turns, several points as I found them disputed in the different books I read, I began to doubt of the Revelation itself." One of his chief reasons for leaving his native place, when he cut himself loose from his brother's employment, was that "his indiscreet disputations about religion began to make him pointed at with horror by good people, as an infidel or atheist."

Both in Philadelphia and London, many of his acquaintances, including Sir William Keith, were disbelievers in the Christian religion, among whom there seemed to exist a strong affinity. Whilst engaged as a journeyman printer in London, he "was

ET. 19.]

VIEWS OF RELIGION.

25

employed in composing for the second edition of Woollaston's Religion of Nature," which he attempted to refute in a small pamphlet he afterwards regretted publishing, called "a Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain."

Franklin says, "there were only one hundred copies printed, of which I gave a few to friends, and afterwards disliking the piece, as conceiving it might have an ill tendency, I burnt the rest, except one copy, the margin of which was filled with manuscript notes, by Lyons, author of the Infallibility of Human Judgment."

This pamphlet brought him into contact with a number of persons of high social position, but of loose morals. Among his acquaintances were Drs. Mandeville and Pemberton. The former of these gentlemen was the leader of a club that held its meetings at a pale-ale house in Cheapside, and is represented as a man of great humor and wit, but eccentric. Dr. Pemberton was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a friend of Sir Isaac Newton's, to whom he promised to introduce Franklin, but never did. He was the author of a treatise on Chemistry as well as a "View of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy."

Franklin pretty soon discovered that the practical effects of his system were most pernicious to society, from which he was himself made to suffer, at the hands of Collins and Ralph, whose religious tenets he had been mainly instrumental in unsettling, and whose departure from the paths of rectitude he never fully forgave himself for. Nor was his own great intellect and high sense of moral propriety sufficient to shield him from the evil and insidious inroads of free-thinking. Nothing short of such fallacious reasoning as "that nothing

in the world could possibly be wrong," and that "vice and virtue were mere empty distinctions," could have induced him to abrogate the ties which bound him to his brother, and leave under the most disreputable imputations the hearth stone of his parents, and the home of his childhood.

In London he likewise took up his abode and shared his purse with an avowed libertine, who had deserted his helpless wife and still more helpless offspring, to lead a life of licentiousness and shame, with a poor frail creature, induced by her affection, to stray from a path of virtue to one of hopeless and abandoned misery. The same cause induced him, after the temporary abandonment of this victim by Ralph, to prove unfaithful to his friend, and cruel to the fallen child of sin, who had been thrown upon his kind offices and protection.

He afterwards "grew convinced that truth, sincerity and integrity in dealing between man and man, were of the utmost importance to the felicity of life;" "and," adds he "I formed written resolutions, which still remain in my journal book, to practice them ever while I lived. Revelation had indeed no weight with me as such, but I entertained an opinion, that, though certain actions might not be bad, because they were forbidden by it, or good because it commanded them, yet, probably, these actions might be forbidden because they were bad for us, or commanded because they were beneficial to us in their own natures, all the circumstances of things considered. And this persuasion, with the kind hand of Providence, or some guardian angel, or accidental favorable circumstances and situations, or all together, preserved me, through this dangerous time of youth, and the hazardous sit