More serious charges have, however, been made, and they are summarized in Davis’s “Travels in America,”[15] which was published in 1803. I have already noticed one of these,—the charge that his letter on air-baths was taken from Aubrey’s “Miscellanies,”—which, on examination, I cannot find to be sustained. Davis also charges that Franklin’s famous epitaph on himself was taken from a Latin one by an Eton school-boy, published with an English translation in the Gentleman’s Magazine for February, 1736. Franklin’s epitaph is already familiar to most of us:
The Body
of
Benjamin Franklin
Printer
(Like the cover of an old book
Its contents torn out
And stript of its lettering and gilding)
Lies here, food for worms.
But the work shall not be lost
For it will (as he believed) appear once more
In a new and more elegant edition
Revised and corrected
by
The Author.
The Eton boy’s was somewhat like it:
Vitæ Volumine peracto
Hic Finis Jacobi Tonson
Perpoliti Sociorum Principis;
Qui Velut Obstetrix Musarum
In Lucem Edivit
Fœlices Ingenii Partus.
Lugete, Scriptorum chorus,
Et Frangite Calamos;
Ille vester, Margine Erasus, deletur!
Sed hæc postrema Inscriptio
Huic primæ Mortis Paginæ
Imprimatur,
Ne Prælo Sepulchri Commissus,
Ipse Editor careat Titulo:
Hic Jacet Bibliopola
Folio vitæ delapso
Expectans novam Editionem
Auctiorem et Emendatiorem.
One of these productions might certainly have been suggested by the other. But Franklin’s grandson, William Temple Franklin, who professed to have the original in his possession, in his grandfather’s handwriting, said that it was dated 1728, and it is printed with that date in one of the editions of Franklin’s works. If this date is correct, it would be too early for the epitaph to have been copied from the one in the Gentleman’s Magazine for February, 1736. It might be said that possibly the Eton boy knew of Franklin’s epitaph; but I cannot find that it was printed or in any way made public before 1736. There is no reason why both should not be original, for everybody wrote epitaphs in that century.
Franklin has been credited by one of his biographers with the invention of the comic epitaph, and Smollett’s famous inscription on Commodore Trunnion’s tomb in “Peregrine Pickle” is described as a mere imitation of Franklin’s epitaph on himself. But there is no evidence that Smollett had seen Franklin’s production before “Peregrine Pickle” was published in 1750, and it was not necessary that he should. There were plenty of similar productions long before that time. Franklin’s own Gazette, January 6 to January 15, 1735/6, gives a very witty inscription on a dead greyhound, which is described as cut on the walls of Lord Cobham’s gardens at Stow. In writing comic epitaphs Franklin was merely following the fashion of his time, and he was hardly as good at it as Smollett.
He has himself told us the source of one of his best short essays, “The Ephemera,” a beautiful little allegory which he wrote to please Madame Brillon in Paris. In a letter to William Carmichael, of June 17, 1780, he describes the circumstances under which it was written, and says that “the thought was partly taken from a little piece of some unknown writer, which I met with fifty years since in a newspaper.”[16] It was in this way that he worked over old material for “Poor Richard.” Everything he had read seemed capable of supplying suggestions, and it must be said that he usually improved on the work of other men.
He was very fond of paraphrasing the Bible as a humorous task and also to show what he conceived to be the meaning of certain passages. He altered the wording of the Book of Job so as to make it a satire on English politics. He did it cleverly, and it was amusing; but it was a very cheap sort of humor.
His most famous joke of this kind was his “Parable against Persecution.” He had learned it by heart, and when he was in England, and the discussion turned on religious liberty, he would open the Bible and read his parable as the last chapter in Genesis. The imitation of the language of Scripture was perfect, and the parable itself was so interesting and striking that every one was delighted with it. His guests would wonder and say that they had never known there was such a chapter in Genesis.
The parable was published and universally admired, but when it appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine some one very quickly discovered that it had been taken from Jeremy Taylor’s Polemical Discourses, and there was a great discussion over it. Franklin afterwards said, in a letter to Mr. Vaughan, that he had taken it from Taylor; and John Adams said that he never pretended that it was original.[17] It is interesting to see how cleverly he improved on Taylor’s language: