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and cut of the letters themselves; they have not that height and thickness of the stroke, which make the common printing so much the more comfortable to the eye." You see this gentleman was a connoisseur. In vain I endeavoured to support your character against the charge; he knew what he felt, and could see the reason of it, and several other gentlemen among his friends had made the same observation, &c.

Yesterday he called to visit me, when, mischievously bent to try his judgment, I stepped into my closet, tore off the top of Mr. Caslon's specimen, and produced it to him as yours, brought with me from Birmingham; saying, I had been examining it, since he spoke to me, and could not for my life perceive the disproportion he mentioned, desiring him to point it out to me. He readily undertook it, and went over the several founts, showing me everywhere what he

to the last degree provoking, that I cannot get even bread by it? I must starve, had I no other dependence. I have offered the London booksellers to print for them within five per cent as low as their common currency, but cannot get from them a single job. I offered my whole apparatus of letter-founding, printing, &c. to the Court of France by the Duke de Nivernois, when he was ambassador here, for eight thousand pounds, which was politely refused as being too large a sum. Mr. Godfroy, who may be heard of at Mr. Sayde's, optician to the King, lately told our good friend Mr. Boulton, that France wished to be possessed of my printing, &c., on moderate terms, in which I heartily join. "The intention of this is, therefore, to beg the favor of you to propose and recommend this affair, as Mr. Godfroy may point out the way. I want only to set on foot a treaty; if they will not come to my terms, I may possibly come to theirs. Suppose we reduce the price to six thousand pounds. Louis the Fourteenth would have given three times that sum, or Czar Peter. Let the reason of my parting with it be, the death of my son and intended successor, and, having acquired a moderate fortune, I wish to consult my ease in the afternoon of life, as I am now turned of sixty."

The French government did not accept the offer. Baskerville died on the 8th of January, 1775. In the year 1779, his types were purchased by a literary Society in Paris for £3700, and were employed in printing Beaumarchais's edition of Voltaire.

thought instances of that disproportion; and declared, that he could not then read the specimen, without feeling very strongly the pain he had mentioned to me. I spared him that time the confusion of being told, that these were the types he had been reading all his life, with so much ease to his eyes; the types his adored Newton is printed with, on which he has pored not a little; nay, the very types his own book is printed with, (for he is himself an author,) and yet never discovered this painful disproportion in them, till he thought they were yours. I am, &c.

B. FRANKLIN.

TO MRS. DEBORAH FRANKLIN.

MY DEAR CHILD,

London, 1760.

Yesterday I received your letter of February 10th, in which you mention that it was some months since you heard from me. During my journey I wrote several times to you, particularly from Liverpool and Glasgow, and since my return some very long letters, that might have been with you before your last to me; but I suppose the severe winter on your coast, among other delays, has kept the vessels out. One packet, Bonnel, was blown quite back to England.

I am sorry for the death of your black boy, as you seem to have had a regard for him. You must have suffered a good deal in the fatigue of nursing him in such a distemper. F has wrote me a very idle letter, desiring me not to furnish the woman, pretending to be his wife, with any thing on his account, and says the letters she shows are a forgery.* But

• In a previous letter to Mrs. Franklin, dated August 6th, 1759, he

I have one she left with me, in which he acknowledges her to be his wife, and the children his, and I am sure it is his handwriting by comparing it with this he has now wrote to me and a former one. So he must be a very bad man, and I am glad I never knew him. She was sick and perishing with her children in the beginning of the winter, and has had of me in all about four guineas. What is become of her now, I know not. She seemed a very helpless body, and I found her in some falsehoods that disgusted me; but I pitied the poor children, the more as they were descended though remotely from our good old friends, whom you remember.

I have now the pleasure to acquaint you, that our business draws near a conclusion, and that in less than a month we shall have a hearing, after which I shall be able to fix a time for my return.* My love to all, from, dear Debby, your affectionate husband, B. FRANKLIN.

said; "There is a person, who represents herself to be the wife of Mr. H. F, watchmaker, of Philadelphia. She tells me a very lame story of her husband's sending her over before him, with two small children, to prepare a place for him, he intending to come here to settle. I cannot understand it; but, as the woman is in distress, and ready to starve with her children for want of necessaries, I have, out of regard for my townsman, furnished her with a little money. Pray mention it privately to him, that I may know whether I ought to advance any more on his account."

In a postscript to the same letter he says; "When you get Mr. Dunlap to direct your letters, desire him not to put the title Honorable before my name, but to direct plainly and simply to 'B. Franklin, Esq., in Craven Street, London.'"

The business was not concluded so soon as he anticipated. The hearing came on, but a strong opposition was made by the Proprietors' counsel against the Pennsylvania claims. Thomas Penn, in a letter to Governor Hamilton, dated June 6th, 1760, says, "Since I wrote to you, we have, on Tuesday last, finished our opposition to the acts of Assembly at the Board of Trade; and we think the arguments, which were well enforced by our counsel, had such an effect on the Lords, as to induce them to repeal most of the laws. From a conversation.

TO THE PRINTER OF THE LONDON CHRONICLE.*

On the Means of disposing an Enemy to Peace; purporting to be a Chapter from an Old Book.

SIR,

I met lately with an old quarto book on a stall, the titlepage and the author's name wanting, but containing discourses, addressed to some king of Spain, extolling the greatness of monarchy, translated into English, and said in the last leaf to be printed at

hat has passed, they are of opinion, that a deputy-governor and the Assembly have no right to give away our property without our consent. Mr. Franklin heard a great deal said of the difference between a representative of the people of England and that of a colony only by a charter from the crown; so that I think he will not dare to patronize such schemes for raising the power of the Assembly to so great a height as he and his friends have done.

"If the Lords of Trade report against all the laws, in which officers are appointed by the Assembly, we shall never after allow them to appoint one again, but their own officers of their House, which by the charter they are allowed to do; but keep the legislative and executive powers entirely distinct."

Again, June 27th, after stating, that the Lords of Trade had reported for the repeal of certain laws, he added; "They have been pleased, in a manner I do not well like, to censure us for not attending so closely to the proceedings of the Assembly as to prevent their encroachments on the prerogative, and say we look upon ourselves as landholders only, which I think is not to be accounted for, when they know we have been disputing with the Assembly for twenty years past in support of the prerogative of the crown. However, as they have reported against these laws, we must put up with that, and the more readily, as it shows their disapprobation of the encroachments and claims of the Assembly."

The date of this paper has not been ascertained. Its contents show it to have been written, however, during the author's first public mission to England, towards the close of the French war, and probably in 1760, or the year following. Under the disguise of a pretended chapter from an old book, and in the imitation of an antiquated style, he throws out hints suited to attract attention and afford amusement. The piece is here printed as transcribed from the first draft; the spelling and capital letters being retained as they are found in the manuscript.

London by Bonham Norton and John Bill, "Printers to the King's most excellent Majestie, MDCXXIX." The author appears to have been a Jesuit, for, speaking of that order in two places, he calls it our Society. Give me leave to communicate to the public a chapter of it, so apropos to our present situation, (only changing Spain for France,) that I think it well worth general attention and observation, as it discovers the arts of our enemies, and may therefore help in some degree to put us on our guard against them.

What effect the artifices here recommended might have had in the times when our author wrote, I cannot pretend to say; but I believe, the present age being more enlightened and our people better acquainted than formerly with our true national interest, such arts can now hardly prove so generally successful; for we may with pleasure observe, and to the honor of the British people, that, though writings and discourses like these have lately not been wanting, yet few in any of the classes he particularizes seem to be affected by them, but all ranks and degrees among us persist hitherto in declaring for a vigorous prosecution of the war, in preference to an unsafe, disadvantageous, or dishonorable peace; yet, as a little change of fortune may make such writings more attended to, and give them greater weight, I think the publication of this piece, as it shows the spring from whence these scribblers draw their poisoned waters, may be of public utility. A BRITON.

"CHAP. XXXIV.

"On the Meanes of disposing the Enemie to Peace. "Warres, with whatsoever Prudence undertaken and conducted, do not always succeed. Many Thinges out

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