Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 20.djvu/206

 his Latin examination at the College of Surgeons. In London he formed a slight acquaintance with the queen's under-librarian, who introduced him to Foote. Foote, in ‘The Devil upon Two Sticks’ (1768), caricatured teacher and pupil as Johnny Macpherson and Dr. Emanuel Last. Fransham wore a plaid, which suggested the Mac, a green jacket with large horn buttons, a broad hat, drab shorts, coarse worsted stockings, and large shoes. The boys called him ‘old horn-buttoned Jack.’

On his return to Norwich, the Chute family, who had a country house at South Pickenham, Norfolk, allowed him (about 1771) to sleep at their Norwich house (where his sister, Mrs. Bennett, was housekeeper) and to use the library. He taught (about 1772) in the family of Samuel Cooper, D.D. [see ], at Brooke Hall, Norfolk, on the terms of board and lodging from Saturday till Monday. This engagement he gave up, as the walk of over six miles out and in was too much for him. When Cooper obtained preferment at Great Yarmouth, Fransham was advised by his friend Robinson to write and ask for a guinea. The difficulty was that Fransham had never written a letter in his life, and after he had copied Robinson's draft, did not know how to fold it. Cooper sent him 5l. The death of young Chute (of which Fransham thought he had warning in a dream) threw Fransham again on his own resources. He reduced his allowance to a farthing's worth of potatoes a day; the experiment of sleeping on Mousehold Heath in his plaid brought on a violent cold, and was not repeated. For nearly three years, from about 1780, he dined every Sunday with counsellor Cooper, a relative of the clergyman, who introduced him to Dr. Parr. From about 1784 to about 1794 he lodged with Thomas Robinson, schoolmaster at St. Peter's Hungate. He left Robinson to lodge with Jay, a baker in St. Clement's. Here he would never allow the floor of his room to be wetted or the walls whitewashed, for fear of damp, and to have his bed made more than once a week he considered ‘the height of effeminacy.’ In 1805 he was asked for assistance by a distant relative, Mrs. Smith; he took her as his housekeeper, hiring a room and a garret in St. George's Colegate. When she left him in 1806 he seems to have resided for about three years with his sister, who had become a widow; leaving her, he made his last move to a garret in Elm Hill. In 1807 or 1808 he made the acquaintance of Michael Stark (d. 1831), a Norwich dyer, and became tutor to his sons, of whom the youngest was James Stark, the artist.

Fransham has been called a pagan and a polytheist chiefly on the strength of his hymns to the ancient gods, his designation of chicken-broth as a sacrifice to Æsculapius, and his describing a change in the weather as Juno's response to supplication. His love for classical antiquity led him to prefer the Greek mathematicians to any of the moderns, to reject (with Berkeley) the doctrine of fluxions, and to despise algebra. Convinced of the legendary origin of all theology, he esteemed the legends of paganism as the most venerable, and put upon them a construction of his own. Taylor, the platonist, he observed, took them in a sense ‘intended for the vulgar alone.’ Hume was to him the ‘prince of philosophers;’ he read Plato with admiration, but among the speculations of antiquity the arguments of Cotta, in the ‘De Natura Deorum,’ were most to his mind. He annotated a copy of Chubb's posthumous works, apparently for republication as a vehicle of his own ideas. In a note to p. 168 of Chubb's ‘Author's Farewell,’ he puts forward the hypothesis of a multiplicity of ‘artists’ as explaining the ‘infinitely various parts of nature.’ In his manuscript ‘Metaphysicorum Elementa’ (begun 1748, and written with Spinoza as his model) he defines God as ‘ens non dependens, quod etiam causa est omnium cæterorum existentium.’ He thinks it obvious that space fulfils the terms of this definition, and hence concludes ‘spatium solum esse Deum,’ adding ‘Deus, vel spatium, est solidum.’ His chief quarrel with the preachers of his time was that they allowed vicious and cruel customs to go unreproved. Asked at an election time for whom he would be inclined to vote, he replied, ‘I would vote for that man who had humanity enough to drive long-tailed horses.’ He was fond of most animals, but disliked dogs, as ‘noisy, mobbish, and vulgar,’ and in his ‘Aristopia, or ideal state,’ he provided for their extermination.

Fransham brought under complete control a temper which in his early years was ungovernable. He rose at five in summer, at six in winter; a strict teetotaller, he ate little animal food, living chiefly on tea and bread-and-butter. To assure himself of the value of health, he would eat tarts till he got a headache, which he cured with strong tea. For his amusement he played a hautboy, but burned the instrument to make tea. Supplying its place with a ‘bilbo-catch,’ he persevered until he had caught the ball on the spike 666,666 times (not in succession; he could never exceed a sequence of two hundred). His dread of fire led him constantly to practise the experiment of letting himself down from an upper story by a ladder. In