“When Abraham sat at his tent-door, according to his custom, waiting to entertain strangers, he espied an old man stooping and leaning on his staff, weary with age and travail, coming toward him, who was a hundred years of age; he received him kindly, washed his feet, provided supper, caused him to sit down; but, observing that the old man eat and prayed not, nor begged for a blessing on his meat, he asked him why he did not worship the God of heaven. The old man told him that he worshipped the fire only, and acknowledged no other god. At which answer Abraham grew so zealously angry that he thrust the old man out of his tent, and exposed him to all the evils of the night and an unguarded condition. When the old man was gone, God called to Abraham, and asked him where the stranger was. He replied, ‘I thrust him away because he did not worship thee.’ God answered him, ‘I have suffered him these hundred years, although he dishonoured me; and couldst not thou endure him one night, when he gave thee no trouble?’ Upon this saith the story, Abraham fetched him back again, and gave him hospitable entertainment and wise instruction. Go thou and do likewise, and thy charity will be rewarded by the God of Abraham.”
Franklin’s pleasantries with this parable led Lord Kames to ask it of him. The fertile Scotchman at once incorporated it in his “Sketches of the History of Man,” and published it in 1774, accrediting it to Franklin. “The charge of plagiarism has, on this account,” says Bishop Heber, in his life of Jeremy Taylor, “been raised against Franklin; though he cannot be proved to have given it to Lord Kames as his own composition. With all Franklin’s abilities and amiable qualities,” continues the clear-eyed bishop, “there was a degree of quackery in his character which ... has made the imputation of such a theft more readily received against him than it would have been against most other men of equal eminence.”
In more finely sensitive writers who have treated Franklin there is a feeling that he “borrowed.” The words of the missionary bishop show the sentiment was common in England a century and a quarter ago. In our country the conviction was expressed with more spirit in a colloquy[9] between a New England man and a Virginian, preserved in John Davis’s manuscript, “Travels in America during 1798-99, 1800, 1801, 1802.”
“I obtained,” wrote Davis of his visit to Washington, “accommodations at the Washington Tavern, which stands opposite the Treasury. At this tavern I took my meals at the public table, where there was every day to be found a number of clerks, employed at the different offices under government, together with about half-a-dozen Virginians and a few New England men. There was a perpetual conflict between these Southern and Northern men, and one night I was present at a vehement dispute, which terminated in the loss of a horse, a saddle, and bridle. The dispute was about Dr. Franklin; the man from New England, enthusiastic in what related to Franklin, asserted that the Doctor, being self-taught, was original in everything that he had ever published.
“The Virginian maintained that he was a downright plagiarist.
“New England Man.—Have you a horse here, my friend?
“Virginian.—Sir, I hope you do not suppose that I came hither on foot from Virginia. I have him in Mr. White’s stable, the prettiest Chickasaw that ever trod upon four pasterns.
“New England Man.—And I have a bay mare that I bought for ninety dollars in hard cash. Now I, my friend, will lay my bay mare against your Chickasaw that Dr. Franklin is not a plagiarist.
“Virginian.—Done! Go it! Waiter! You, waiter!