Page:History of the University of Pennsylvania - Montgomery (1900).djvu/197

Rh animated the language; yet, as censure from your friends may be of more use, as well as more agreeable to you, than praise, I ought to mention, that I wish you had omitted, not only the quotation from the Review, which you are now justly dissatisfied with, but all those 15 expressions of resentment against your adversaries, in pages 65 and 79. In such cases the noblest victory is obtained by neglect, and by shining on. 16 Mr. Allen has been out of town these ten days; but before he went, he directed me to procure him six of your " pieces, though he had not and has not yet seen it. 18 Mr. Peters has taken ten. He proposed 19 to have written; to you, but omits it, as he expects so soon to have the pleasure of seeing you here. He desires me to present his affectionate regards to you, and to assure you that you will be very welcome to him. I shall only say to you that you may depend upon my doing all in my power to make your visit to Philadelphia agreeable to you. 20 Yet, me thinks I would not have you omit bringing a line or two from Mr. Allen. If you are more noticed here on account of his recommendation, yet as that recommendation will be founded upon your merit, known best where you have so long resided, their notice may be esteemed to be as much ' ' on the score of something you^can call your own," as if it were merely on account of the pieces you 15 All not in draft. 16 In a letter from the Bishop of Oxford to Dr. Johnson, 19 March, 1754 when Mr. Smith was in London awaiting his ordination, the Bishop says, " if he had pursued his intention of residing awhile at Oxford, I should 'have hoped for more of his company and acquaintance. Nor would he, I think, have failed to see more fully, what I flatter myself he is convinced of without it, that our Universities do not deserve the sentence which is passed upon them by the author whom he cites, and whose words he adopts in page 84 of his ' General Idea of the College of Mirania.' He assures me they are effaced in almost all the copies. I wish they had not been printed, or that the leaf had been cancelled. But the many valuable things which there is in that performance, and in the papers which he published at New York, will atone for this blemish with all candid persons." Beardsley's Johnson, '78. The Bishop's reference is to the following: " They know little what our English Universities are at present: For, to use the words of the authors of the Review, for November, 1750: 'That even both our Universities (not forgetting that in the Metropolis of a neighboring Kingdom) are rendered of little use to the Public, or to the Welfare of Religion, by the idle Doctrines and corrupt Manners which prevail in them, is a Truth equally notorious and melancholy; and any effectual scheme for a thoro' Reformation or (if this is impossible, thro' the Perverseness of their Members) a total abolition of them would merit the attention of every Lover of his Country, every Well wisher to true Christianity, and to civil and religious Liberty.' " Mirania, p. 84. On Smith's copy of the Mirania, he adds on the margin opposite these lines " This quotation was raz'd out of most of the copies before they got abroad, the author considering them injuriously applied." But for Franklin's reference to the author's personal allusion on pages 65 and 79 of Mirania, we should not now know that they were "expressions of resentment against his adversaries;" thus early in his American career had his active zeal in devising new things been intensified by his warm temperament and a youthful proneness to disputation. 17 Six copies of your piece in draft. 18 This last phrase not in draft. 19 Purposed in draft. 20 This ends the draft. The letter proceeds.