Читать книгу The Life of Benjamin Franklin - Mason Locke Weems - Страница 8

At a learned table in Paris, where Dr. Franklin happened to dine, it was asked by the abbé Raynal, What description of men most deserves pity?

Some mentioned one character, and some another. When it came to Franklin's turn, he replied, A lonesome man in a rainy day, who does not know how to read.

As every thing is interesting that relates to one who made such a figure in the world, it may gratify our readers to be told what were the books that first regaled the youthful appetite of the great Dr. Franklin. The state of literature in Boston at that time, being like himself, only in its infancy, it is not to be supposed that Ben had any very great choice of books. Books, however, there always were in Boston.1 Among these was Bunyan's Voyages, which appears to have been the first he ever read, and of which he speaks with great pleasure. But there is reason to fear that Bunyan did no good: for, as it was the reading of the life of Alexander the Great that first set Charles the Twelfth in such a fever to be running over the world killing every body he met; so, in all probability, it was Bunyan's Voyages that fired Ben's fancy with that passion for travelling, which gave his father so much uneasiness. Having read over old Bunyan so often as to have him almost by heart, Ben added a little boot, and made a swap of him for Burton's Historical Miscellanies. This, consisting of forty or fifty volumes, held him a good long tug: for he had no time to read but on Sundays, and early in the morning or late at night. After this he fell upon his father's library. This being made up principally of old puritanical divinity, would to most boys have appeared like the pillars of Hercules to travellers of old—a bound not to be passed. But so keen was Ben's appetite for any thing in the shape of a book, that he fell upon it with his usual voracity, and soon devoured every thing in it, especially of the lighter sort. Seeing a little bundle of something crammed away very snugly upon an upper shelf, his curiosity led him to take it down: and lo! what should it be but "Plutarch's Lives." Ben was a stranger to the work; but the title alone was enough for him; he instantly gave it one reading; and then a second, and a third, and so on until he had almost committed it to memory; and to his dying day he never mentioned the name of Plutarch without acknowledging how much pleasure and profit he had derived from that divine old writer. And there was another book, by Defoe, a small affair, entitled "An Essay on Projects," to which he pays the very high compliment of saying, that "from it he received impressions which influenced some of the principal events of his life."

Happy now to find that books had the charm to keep his darling boy at home, and thinking that if he were put into a printing office he would be sure to get books enough, his father determined to make a printer of him, though he already had a son in that business. Exactly to his wishes, that son, whose name was James, had just returned from London with a new press and types. Accordingly, without loss of time, Ben, now in his twelfth year, was bound apprentice to him. By the indentures Ben was to serve his brother till twenty-one, i.e. nine full years, without receiving one penny of wages save for the last twelve months! How a man pretending to religion could reconcile it to himself to make so hard a bargain with a younger brother, is strange. But perhaps it was permitted of God, that Ben should learn his ideas of oppression, not from reading but from suffering. The deliverers of mankind have all been made perfect through suffering. And to the galling sense of this villanous oppression, which never ceased to rankle on the mind of Franklin, the American people owe much of that spirited resistance to British injustice, which eventuated in their liberties. But Master James had no great cause to boast of this selfish treatment of his younger brother Benjamin; for the old adage "foul play never thrives," was hardly ever more remarkably illustrated than in this affair, as the reader will in due season be brought to understand.