century since, be very plausibly supposed, that self-interest, working on a large class of men, would get the better of conscience; and that a catholic, excluded from political honours, cut off from many even of the common rights of property, and rendered a slave and alien in his own country, would either quit that country, or the faith, which made the country a stepmother to him. Protestantism, however, has made no converts; and as a great majo. rity of the people have adhered to their original tenets under such discouraging circumstances, the esta blished church of Ireland may perhaps be considered as an experiment which has completely failed. No rational man can look to a time when the catholic religion will not prevail in Ireland. Few nations have had a stronger interest, politically speaking, in the progress of one sect above another, than Great Britain in the growth of the reformed faith on the west of St. George's Channel. But she has not been suc cessful in her method. Laws, penal or restrictive, are but rough medicines, and if the disease be incurable, it is some consolation to have discarded the physician. The surprize which many worthy protestants may feel at the slow progress of their own opinions, in a country subject to the same laws as England, will probably be abated, when they know the actual state of the Irish hierarchy. An account, presented to the house of commons in 1803, exhibits the number of parishes in Ireland, and of the benefices or unions of parishes into which the same have been distributed and reduced, and also of the churches and glebe houses which actually existed in 1791. This document exhibits a striking view of the aptness which the ecclesiastical establishment of Ireland seems to possess for diffusing religious instruction throughout the mass of the people. According to this statement, there are about 2400 parishes, which have been thrown, by unions, many of them very improper, and some very recently made, into about 1100 benefices, some of which extend over vast tracts of country. Many of the parishes have no church, which was the case with a parish in Dublin, said to contain 20,000 inhabitants. Many of the benefices have no glebe, the ancient glebe having been confounded with, and lost in, the lands of lay-proprietors. Many more of the benefices have no glebe house, so that the clergyman has no means of residence within his parish: unfortunately, too, benefices in this deplorable state have been deemed the most desirable: a parish without a church, without a glebe-house, and, an almost necessary consequence, without a protestant inhabitant. For the Literary Magazine. CHARACTER OF DR. FRANKLIN. A JUST view of the character of Dr. Franklin has probably never been given by any of his countrymen. While living, the world was divided into passionate friends and rancorous enemies, and since his death a kind of political tincture still adheres to all our sentiments concerning him. Among his own countrymen, prejudice and passion, which used to be enlisted wholly on his side, has, in some respects, become hostile to him, and an impartial estimate of his merits can perhaps only be looked for among foreigners. The following portrait is taken from a foreign publication, and seems to be altogether dispassionate and equi table. Nothing, says this writer, can show more clearly the singular want of literary enterprize or activity, in America, than that no one has yet been found, in that flourishing republic, to collect and publish the works of their only philosopher. It is not even very creditable to the liberal curiosity of the English public, that there should have been no complete edition of the writings of Dr. Franklin, till the year 1806; nor should we be able to account for the imperfect manner in which the task has now been performed, but for a statement in the prefatory advertisement. We are told, that recently after the death of the author, his grandson, to whom the whole of his papers were bequeathed, made a voyage to London, for the purpose of preparing and disposing of a complete collection of all his published and unpublished writings, with memoirs of his life, brought down by himself to the year 1757, and continued to his death by his descendant. The work was to be published in three quarto volumes, in England, Germany, and France; and a negotiation was commenced with the booksellers. At this stage of the business, however, the proposals were suddenly withdrawn, and nothing more has been heard of the work in this its fair and natural market. It is hinted that the suppression of the work was purchased by the British ministry. We shall omit the reflexions which this statement naturally suggests to us, whether we consider the claims of the dead or of the living, and proceed to some general remarks upon the character of Franklin. standing like Franklin's, they were peculiarly propitious, and we can trace back to them, distinctly, almost all the peculiarities of his intellectual character. Regular education is unfavourable to vigour or originality of understanding. Like civilization, it makes society more intelligent and agreeable; but it levels the distinctions of nature. It strengthens and assists the feeble; but it deprives the strong of his triumph, and casts down the hopes of the aspiring. It accomplishes this, not only by training up the mind in a habitual veneration for authori ties, but, by leading us to bestow a disproportionate degree of attention on studies that are only valuable as keys or instruments for the understanding, they come at last to be regarded as ultimate objects of pursuit; and the means of education are absurdly mistaken for its end. How many powerful understandings have been lost in the dialectics of Aristotle! and of how much good philosophy are we daily defrauded, by the preposterous error of taking a knowledge of prosody for useful learning! The mind of a man, who has escaped this training, will at least have fair play. Whatever other errors he may fall into, he will be safe at least from their infatuations. If he thinks proper, after he grows up, to study Greek, it will be for some better purpose than to become acquainted with its dialects. His prejudices will be those of a man, and not of a schoolboy; and his speculations and conclusions will be independent of the maxims of tutors, and the oracles of literary patrons. This self-taught American is the most rational, perhaps, of all philosophers. He never loses sight of common sense in any of his speculations; and when his philosophy does not consist entirely in its fair and vigorous application, it is always regulated and controaled by it in its application and result. No individual, perhaps, ever possessed a juster understanding, or was so seldom obstructed in the use of it by indolence, enthusiasm, or authority. The consequences of living in a Dr Franklin received no regular refined and literary community, are education; and he spent the greater nearly of the same kind with those part of his life in a society where of a regular education. There are there was no relish and no encou- so many critics to be satisfied, so ragement for literature. On an or~many qualifications to be establishdinary mind, these circumstances would have produced their usual effects, of repressing all sort of intelectical ambition or activity, and perpetuating a generation of incu ribus mechanics; but to an under ed, so many rivals to encounter, and so much derision to be hazarded, that a young man is apt to be deterred from so perilous an enterprize, and led to seek for distinction in some safer line of exertion. He is discouraged by the fame and the perfection of certain models and favourites, who are always in the mouths of his judges, and, ' under them, his genius is rebuked,' and originality repressed, till he sinks into a paltry copyist, or aims at distinction, by extravagance and affectation. In such a state of society, he feels that mediocrity has no chance of distinction; and what beginner can expect to rise at once into excellence? He imagines that mere good sense will attract no attention; and that the manner is of much more importance than the matter, in a candidate for public admiration. In his attention to the manner, the matter is apt to be neglected; and, in his solicitude to please those who require elegance of diction, brilliancy of wit, or har mony of periods, he is in some danger of forgetting that strength of reason, and accuracy of observation by which he first proposed to recommend himself. His attention, when extended to so many collateral ob jects, is no longer vigorous or collected: the stream, divided into so many channels, ceases to flow either deep or strong; he becomes an unsuccessful pretender to fine writing, and is satisfied with the frivolous praise of elegance or vivacity. These obstructions to intellectual originality are so powerful, that if Franklin had been bred in a college, he would probably have contented himself with expounding the metres of Pindar, and mixing argument with his port in the common room; and that if Boston had abounded with men of letters, he would never have ventured to come forth from his printing-house, or been driven back to it, at any rate, by the sneers of the critics, after the first publication of his essays in the Busy Body. This will probably be thought exaggerated; but it cannot be denied that the contrary circumstances in his history had a powerful effect in determining the character of his understanding, and in producing those peculiar habits of reasoning and in vestigation by which his writings are distinguished. He was encouraged to publish, because there was scarcely any one around him whom he could not easily excel. He wrote with great brevity, because he had not leisure for more voluminous compositions, and because he knew that the readers to whom he addressed himself were, for the most part, as busy as himself. For the same reason, he studied great perspicuity and simplicity of statement: his countrymen had no relish for fine writing, and could not easily be made to understand a deduction depending on a long or elaborate process of reasoning. He was forced, therefore, to concentrate what he had to say; and since he had no chance of being admired for the beauty of his composition, it was natural for him to aim at making an impression by the force and clearness of his state ments. His conclusions were often rash and inaccurate, from the same circumstances which rendered his productions concise. Philosophy and speculation did not form the business of his life; nor did he dedicate himself to any particular study, with a view to exhaust and complete the investigation of it in all its parts, and under all its relations. He engaged in every interesting inquiry that suggested itself to him, rather as the necessary exercise of a powerful and active mind, than as a task which he had bound himself to perform. He cast a quick and penetrating glance over the facts and the data that were presented to him; and drew his conclusions with a rapidity and precision that have not often been equalled: but he did not stop to examine the completeness of the data upon which he proceeded, nor to consider the ultimate effect or application of the principles to which he had been conducted. In all questions, therefore, where the facts upon which he was to determine, and the materials from which his judgment was to be formed, were either few in number, or of such a nature as not to be over looked, his reasonings are for the most part perfectly just and conclusive, and his decisions unexceptionably sound; but where the elements of the calculation were more numerous and widely scattered, he has often been precipitate, and he has either been misled by a partial apprehension of the conditions of the problem, or has discovered only a portion of the truth which lay before him. In all physical inquiries; in almost all questions of particular and immediate policy; and in much of what relates to the practical wis dom and the happiness of private life, his views will be found to be admirable, and the reasoning by which they are supported most mas terly and convincing. But on subjects of general politics, of abstract morality, and political economy, his notions appear to be more unsatis factory and incomplete. He seems to have wanted leisure, and, perhaps, inclination also, to spread out before him the whole vast premises of these extensive sciences, and scarcely to have had patience to hunt for his conclusions through so wide and intricate a region as that upon which they invited him to enter. He has been satisfied, therefore, on every occa sion, with reasoning from a very limited view of the facts, and often from a particular instance: he has done all that sagacity and sound sense could do with such materials; but it cannot excite wonder, if he has sometimes overlooked an essential part of the argument, and often advanced a particular truth into the place of a general principle. He seldom reasoned on these subjects at all, without having some practical application of them inmediately in view; and as he began the investigation rather to determine a particular case, than to establish a general maxim, so he probably desisted as soon as he had relieved himself of the present difficulty. There are not many among the thorough bred scholars and philosophers of Europe, who can lay claim to distinction in more than one or two departments of science or lite rature. The uneducated tradesman of America has left writings that call for our attention, in natural philosophy, in politics, in political economy, and in general literature and morality. His labours in the department of physics were almost all suggested by views of utility in the beginning, and were, without exception, applied to promote those views in the end. His letters on electricity have been more extensively circulated than any of his other writings; and are entitled to more praise and po pularity than they seem ever to have met with in Europe. Nothing can be more admirable than the luminous and graphical precision with which the experiments are narrated; the ingenuity with whch they are projected; and the sa gacity with which the conclusion is inferred, limited, and confirm ed. The most remarkable thing, however, in these, and, indeed, in the whole of his physical speculations, is the unparalleled simplicity and facility with which the reader is conducted from one stage of the inquiry to another. The author never appears for a moment to labour, or to be at a loss. The most ingenious and profound explanations are suggested, as if they were the most natural and obvious way of accounting for phenomena; and the author scems to value himself so little on his most important discoveries, that it is necessary to compare him with others, before we can form a just notion of his merits. As he seems to be conscious of no exertion, he feels no partiality for any part of his speculations, and never seeks to raise the reader's idea of their importance, by any arts of declamation or eloquence.. Indeed, the habitual precision of his conceptions, and his invariable practice of referring to specific facts and observations, secured him, in a great measure, both from those extravagant conjectures in which so many naturalists have indulged, and from the zeal and enthusiasm which seems so naturally engendered in their defence. He was by no means averse to give scope to his imagination, in suggesting a variety of explanations of obscure and unmanageable phenomena; but he never allowed himself to confound these vague and conjectural theories with the solid results of experience and observation. In his meteorological papers, and in his observations on heat and light, there is a great deal of such bold and original suggestions; but the author evidently sets little value on them; and has no sooner disburdened his mind of the impressions from which they proceeded, than he seems to dismiss them entirely from his consideration, and turns to the legitimate philosophy of experiment with unabated diligence and humility. As an instance of this disposition, might be quoted a letter to the abbe Soulavie, on a new theory of the earth, which he proposes and dismisses, without concern or anxiety, in the course of a few sentences; though, if the idea had fallen on the brain of a European philosopher, it might have germinated into a volume of eloquence, like Buffon's, or an infinite array of paragraphs and observations, like those of Parkinson or Dr. Hutton. All his physical papers are admirable for the clearness of the description, the felicity and familiarity of the illustrations, and the singular sagacity of the remarks with which they are interspersed. Such are the theory of whirlwinds and waterspouts, as well as the observations on the course of the winds and on cold. His paper, called Maritime Observations, is full of ingenuity and practical good sense; and the remarks on evaporation, and on the tides, most of which are contained in a series of letters to a young lady, are admirable, not merely for their perspicuity, but for the interest and amusement they are calculated to communicate to every description VOL. VI. NO. XXXVIII. of readers. The remarks on fireplaces and smoky chimnies are infinitely more original, concise, and scientific, than those of count Rumford; and the observations on the gulph stream afford the first example of just theory and accurate investigation, applied to that phenomenon. Dr. Franklin has never made use of the mathematics, in his investigation of the phenomena of nature; and though this may render it surprizing that he has fallen into so few errors of importance, yet it helps in some measure to explain the unequalled perspicuity and vivacity of his expositions. An algebraist, who can work wonders with letters, seldom condescends to be much indebted to words, and thinks himself entitled to make his sentences obscure, provided his calcu lations be distinct. A writer who has nothing but words to make use of, must make all the use he can of them: he cannot afford to neglect the only chance he has of being understood. His political writings first raised him into public office and eminence, but will be least read or attended to by posterity. They may be divided into two parts; those which relate to the internal affairs and provincial differences of the American colonies, before their quarrel with the mother country; and those which relate to that quarrel and its consequences. The former are no longer in any degree interesting: The longest of them was published in 1759, under the title of a Historical Review of the Constitution of Pennsylvania, and was composed for the purpose of showing that the political privileges reserved to the founder of the colony had been illegally and oppressively used. The Canada pamphlet, written in 1760, for the purpose of pointing out the importance of retaining that colony at the peace, is composed with great force of reason, and in a style of extraordinary perspicuity. The same may be said of what are called the Albany papers, or the plan for a general political union of the cole 7 |