Page:History of the University of Pennsylvania - Montgomery (1900).djvu/42

38 abstracts of what they read, or writing the same things in their own words; telling or writing stories lately read, in their own expressions.

Here we are reminded of Franklin's own early experiments in composition; when a lad of but thirteen or fourteen years reading the Spectator made him ambitious to excel in style. And with the view, if possible, of imitating it, his narrative tells us

I took some of the papers, and making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try'd to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should occur to me. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them. But I found I wanted a stock of words, or a readiness in recollecting and using them, which I thought I should have acquired before that time if I had gone on making verses; since the continual occasion for words of the same import, but of different length to suit the measure, or of different sound for the rhyme, would have laid me under a constant necessity of searching for variety, and also have tended to fix that variety in my mind, and make me master of it. Therefore I took some of the tales and turned them into verse; and, after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back again. By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovered my faults, and amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language, and this encouraged me to think, that I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer; of which I was extremely ambitious.

Franklin became more than a tolerable English writer, and he remained to his latest years a master in the art; and the foundation of this was laid in the strenuous efforts of his boyhood for success, the memory of which must have been in his mind even when he was writing his Proposals, to which after this digression we must turn again.

He recurs to History, as embracing Geography, Chronology, Ancient Customs, Morals, Politics, and Oratory:

History will also give occasion to expatiate on the advantage of civil orders and constitutions; how men and their properties are protected by joining in societies and establishing government; their industry encouraged and rewarded, arts invented, and life made more comfortable; the