courts; and may judge, sentence, and condemn to infamy, not only private individuals, but public bodies, &c. with or without inquiry or hearing, at the court's discretion.

In whose favour and for whose emolument this court is established.— In favour of about one citizen in five hundred, who, by education or practice in scribbling, has acquired a tolerable style as to grammar and construction, so as to bear printing; or who is possessed of a press and a few types. This five hundreth part of the citizens have the privilege of accusing and abusing the other four hundred and ninety-nine parts at their pleasure; or they may hire out their pens and press to others for

that purpose.

'Practice of the Court. It is not governed by any of the rules of common courts of law. The accused is allowed no grand jury to judge of the truth of the accusation before it is publicly made, nor is the name of the accuser made known to him, nor has he an opportunity of confronting the witnesses against him; for they are kept in the dark, as in the Spanish court of inquisition. Nor is there any petty jury of his peers sworn to try the truth of the charges. The proceedings are also sometimes so rapid, that an honest good citizen may find himself suddenly and unexpectedly accused, and in the same morning judged and condemned, and sentence pronounced against him, that he is a rogue and a villain. Yet, if an officer of this court receives the slightest check for misconduct in this his office, he claims immediately the rights of a free citizen by the constitution, and demands to know his accuser, to confront the witnesses, and to have a fair trial by a jury of his peers.

By whom this court is commissioned or constituted.-It is not by any commission from the supreme executive council, who might previously judge of the abilities, integrity, knowledge, &c. of the persons to be appointed to this great trust, of deciding upon the characters and good fame of the citizens; for this court is above that council, and may accuse, judge, and condemn it, at pleasure. Nor is it hereditary, as in the court of dernier resort, in the peerage of England. But any man who can procure pen, ink, and paper, with a press, a few types, and a huge pair of BLACKING balls, may commissionate himself; and his court is immediately established in the plenary possession and exercise of its rights. For if you make the least complaint of the judge's conduct, he daubs his blacking balls in your face wherever he meets you; and besides tearing your private character to flitters, marks you out for the odium of the public, as an enemy to the liberty of the press.'

The third section of the department of Miscellanies, is headed Bagatelles, and we are told in a brief preamble of the editor, that the articles contained in this section were chiefly written by Franklin for the amusement of his intimate society of London and Paris, and were by himself collected in a small port-folio, endorsed as above.' The collection embraced some few inedited pieces, which, with two or three exceptions, are worthy of an association with such charming effusions as the visit to the Elysian fields, addressed to Me. Helvetius, the Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout,' and others which had already found their way into the public prints. This true philosopher had the art and almost always the design, of couching a profound moral, in what he thus chose to designate as trifles: he could convey the most striking

lessons under the forms of the lightest pleasantry. He delighted in allegories and apologues of a jocular cast, not more from the natural hilarity of his temper, than on account of the greater facility which they afforded him of fixing the attention of mankind upon liberal principles and prudential maxims. We observe a short tale among the bagatelles which we shall quote by way of illustrating his benevolent policy, as well as the subtlety of his

The doctrine implied in what follows, may appear to be somewhat too latitudinarian, but Franklin was as ardent as he was generous in his zeal for toleration, and anxiously alive to the tendencies of the opposite system.

'A Tale.-An officer named Montresor, a worthy man, was very ill. The curate of his parish, thinking him likely to die, advised him to make his peace with God, that he might be received into Paradise. • I have not much uneasiness on the subject,' said Montresor, for I had a vision last night which has perfectly tranquilised my mind.' What vision have you had?' said the good priest. I was,' replied Montresor, ' at the gate of Paradise, with a crowd of people who wished to enter, and St. Peter inquired of every one what religion he was of? One answered, I am a Roman Catholic;-Well, said St. Peter, enter and take your place there among the Catholics. Another said he was of the Church of England;-Well, said the Saint, enter and place yourself there among the Anglicans. A third said he was a Quaker;-Enter, said St. Peter, and take your place among the Quakers. At length, my turn being come, he asked me of what religion I was? Alas, said I, poor Jacques Montresor has none. 'Tis pity, said the Saint; I know not where to place you, but enter nevertheless, and place yourself where you can.'

Some of the compositions in this section are printed, as they were originally written, in French, and show that Franklin had learned to wield that language with as much ease and almost as much power, as his own. The most considerable of them is a burlesque, which fills several pages, entitled 'An humble petition preferred to Madame Helvetius, by her cats,' on the occasion of an order issued by the good lady, to drown her whole retinue of Grimalkins, for various instinctive depredations. Her old friend gives a loose to his playful humour, and amuses himself with a series of sarcastic allusions to the affairs of her household, and the peculiarities of her literary circle. He rallies her upon her general ignorance, her bad orthography, and her wretched penmanship, mixing with his jests the most delicate and ingenious compliments. We shall not attempt to make any extracts from this performance, because it would be necessary to accompany them with explanations, of which our limits do not allow. It must have given infinite pleasure to the parties for whom it was intended, and it stands a striking monument of that strong flow of spirits, that amiable gayety, the social exhiliration, which no employments however grave, no official cares, no weight of years, nor decrepitude of body, could in the slightest degree affect.

The papers on subjects of natural philosophy, to which part IV. of this volume is devoted, occupy more than two hundred of its pages. Most of them, as has been said, have the attraction of novelty, besides the interest which they possess as the speculations of a first-rate discoverer and original thinker in science. We should be carried too far, if we undertook to give an idea of their contents, or to particularize them all. The attention of medical men and of general readers, will be drawn to a considerable mass of 'notes and hints for a paper on what is called catching cold,' which appear to us to be highly valuable, and fitted to excite a lively regret that the paper was not completed.

In turning over the leaves of part IV. we were arrested by a passage in one of his communications to Dr. Ingenhauz, which he seems to have written with the feeling resulting from personal experience. It is as follows:

I have now before me your several favours of December 5, 1780, February 7, April 7, May 23, and August 29, 1781. I was glad to find by the first, that you enjoyed a good state of health, and that you had leisure to pursue your philosophical inquiries. I wish you that continued success which so much industry, sagacity, and exactness in making experiments, have a right to expect. You will have much immediate pleasure by that success, and in time great reputation. But for the present the reputation will be given grudgingly, and in as small a quantity as possible, mixed too with some mortification. One would think that a man so labouring disinterestedly for the good of his fellow creatures, could not possibly by such means make himself enemies; but there are minds who cannot bear that another should distinguish himself even by greater usefulness; and though he demands no profit, nor any thing in return but the good-will of those he is serving, they will endeavour to deprive him of that, first by disputing the truth of his experiments, then their utility, and being defeated there, they finally dispute his right to them, and would give the credit of them to a man that lived three thousand years ago, or at three thousand leagues distance, rather than to a neighbour or even a friend. Go on,, however, and never be discouraged. Others have met with the same treatment before you, and will after you. And whatever some may think and say, it is worth while to do men good, for the self-satisfaction one has in the reflection.'

Our philosopher was uniformly sanguine with respect to the progress of human knowledge. It was his favourite phrase- let no man flatter the age that we have arrived at the perfection of discoveries.' When balloons were first tried, some person having exclaimed in his presence- but what are they good for?' he asked in his turn: And what is the infant just born good for?' There is a letter in this volume to Dr. Ingenhauz, respecting balloons, from which it is to be inferred, that Franklin took a lively interest in the invention, and rather over-rated its promise. If his fancy works too strongly in the following phrases, it is at the instigation of his vigilant humanity. This appears,

observe, to be a discovery of great importance, and what

may, possibly, give a new turn to human affairs. Convincing so. vereigns of the folly of wars may, perhaps, be one effect of it. Since it will be impracticable for the most potent of them to guard his dominions. Five thousand balloons capable of raising two men each, could not cost more than five ships of the line: and where is the prince who can afford so to cover his country with troops for its defence, as that ten thousand men descending from the clouds, might not in many places do an infinite deal of mischief, before a force could be brought together to repel them?'

The portion of these philosophical papers, hitherto unknown, recals forcibly the remarks of professor Playfair, concerning the others. The most ingenious and profound explanations are suggested, as if they were the most natural and obvious way of accounting for the phenomena; the author seems to value himself so little on them, that it is necessary to compare him with others, before we can form a just notion of his merits.' Not the slightest indication of self-importance is to be detected in his most lofty and original speculations: even his grand results respecting the cause of lightning,' as they are styled by sir Humphrey Davy seem to have touched him only in their relation to the welfare of mankind. Had he descried the great field of discovery to which they called the attention of the philosophers of Europe-had he foreseen the advances which science is making by means of the voltaic apparatus-the theory of whose operation is founded, says the eminent chemist just mentioned, on the Franklinian idea of an electrical fluid, for which certain bodies have stronger attractions than others-we should have had no airs of selfcomplacency; we should have heard from him as in the case of his immediate successes-disinterested rejoicings in the increase of human knowledge, and unaffected expressions of humility at the comparative insignificance of its amount.

It is observed by Playfair, that Franklin's remarks on fire-places and smoky chimnies, are infinitely more original, concise, and scientific, than those of count Rumford. When the two names are brought together, we are led to the reflection, that our country may claim the merit of having produced the philosophers who most systematically and successfully applied physical science to the common wants and purposes of life.

The philosophical theories of Franklin; for instance, those of the earth, of light and heat-and all his conjectures in physics, bespeak an imagination of the greatest vigour and vivacity. One just rising from the perusal of the whole selection under review, fresh from the delightful fictions and ingenious illustrations, the novel turns of thought and diction with which it abounds, will allow him scarcely less of fancy than of acuteness and judgment.

We shall not dilate upon the unequalled perspicuity, the quick and poignant brevity,' the unremitting vividness, and rich variety of his style, about which so much has been said, with such warmth

of panegyric, by the European critics. The reproach of vulgarity thrown out against it by some of them, appears to us, we must confess, to have little foundation; not more, certainly, than exists for a similar one against almost any English writer equally voluminous. Coarse terms occur indeed, from time to time, in his practical and familiar compositions; but only, we are inclined to think, when they are indispensable, or best adapted for the occasion. The great English writers of the reign of queen Anne, have sinned against delicacy in language in a thousand instances, to one that can be proved upon the American tradesman;' and if we took an example among the more modern authors of celebrity, say Mr. Burk or the magnates of the Edinburgh Review, our countryman could but gain by the comparison. Franklin is eminently a moral writer, in every sense of the phrase; he indulges in no allusions or imagery, fitted to inflame and vitiate the imagination; we question whether he any where falls into grossness of expression, without having it at the same time directly in view to recommend purity of conduct.

There is a striking, perhaps exclusive distinction, which may be claimed for his writings considered as models of literary excellence it is that this excellence though the effect of early preparation of the most laborious sort, was not immediately intentional; in no one of them, does he appear to have aimed at displaying his powers or acquiring literary fame: We are justified in supposing that he would willingly, like Socrates, have confined himself to oral discussion and exhortation, had his ends of business or philanthropy been attainable in this course. In an English journal, the Eclectic Review, we find him characterized in general, in a way which would suit him as an author specially. Franklin's predominant passion appears to have been love of the useful. The useful was to him the summum bonum, the supremely fair, the sublime and beautiful, which it may not, perhaps, be extravagant to assert, he was in quest of every week or day for half a century, in whatever place, or study, or practical undertaking. No department was too plain or humble for him to occupy himself in for this purpose; and in affairs of the most ambitious order this was still systematically his object. Whether in directing the construction of chimneys or of constitutions, lecturing on the saving of candles, or on the economy of national revenues, he was still intent on the same end; the question with him being always, how to obtain the most of solid, tangible advantage by the plainest and easiest means.'

The paper respecting a plan of studies for the University of Pennsylvania, dated in the year 1789, and extant in the present volume, shews that this apostle of the useful, retained to the last, a keen solicitude for the proficiency of his countrymen in English composition. It evinces, also, how great was the variety and refined the choice of his reading; how carefully he had investigated and practised the best modes of forming an elegant style. H itings generally afford ample proof that he had an intimate