present that really interested him, and the possession of the past, the long backward of time, was to him a mere oblivion. Parton regarded Franklin as the model Christian, others find no religion in him at all. Their views depend on how they are affected by his absorption in the present, by his relegation of Faith and Hope to the attic and his choice of earth-born Charity. There is, in fact, no more extraordinary chapter in the religious history of the eighteenth century than the episode of the Autobiography which tells how Franklin deliberately set aside all the traditions and experience of the past and set himself to create a brand-new worship of his own, adapted to the needs of the hour. Was this prophetic of our cheerful readiness, long ago observed by Renan, to start a new religion among us every time a man is convicted of sin? Are Christian Science and all the lesser brood merely in the line of Franklin's projected brotherhood of "The Free and Easy"? Some of the more modern sects seem at least to have taken to themselves that society's virtue of "industry," and have made themselves " 'free of debt." And it was this overmastering sense of the present that coloured Franklin's schemes of X education. Everything should be practical, and look to immediate results. Naturally the Classics, as the very embodiment of the past, received scant sympathy from him. He merely tolerated them in the project which led to the Philadelphia Academy and the University of Pennsylvania, and one of his last pamphlets, written, indeed, from his death-bed, was a diatribe against Greek and Latin. As a writer he has all the clearness, force, and flexibility that come from attention to what is near at hand; he lacks also that depth of background which we call imagination, and which is largely the indwelling of the past in the present. A clear, steady light rests upon his works; no obscuring shadow stretches out over them from remote days, and also no shade inviting to repose. It is not by accident that his two most literary productions, in the stricter sense of that word, are the Autobiography, which might be called a long lesson in the method of settling problems of immediate necessity, and the Introductions to the Almanacs-those documents in contemporaneity that have so strangely weathered the years. Particularly the Introduction of 1757, known as the Harangue of Father Abraham, has been translated into all the languages of the world, and has almost made of Poor Richard a figure of popular mythology: I found the good man had thoroughly studied my almanacs and digested all I had dropped on these topics during the course of five and twenty years. The frequent mention he made of me must have tired any one else; but my vanity was wonderfully delighted with it, though I was conscious that not a tenth part of the wisdom was my own, which he ascribed to me, but rather the gleanings that I had made of the sense of all ages and nations. And the sense of all ages is pretty well summed up by Poor Richard in "One to-day is worth two to-morrows." CHARLES LAMB AGAIN I HAVE already said something in these essays about Lamb as a writer and man, but the occasion of two excellent biographies,' in French and English, is too tempting to let pass without a word of more particular appreciation. In the matter of literary criticism the honour must remain, as might be expected, with the Frenchman. M. Derocquigny has indeed treated this aspect of his theme with an amplitude and a precision which no English writer has approached, and he has also shown the trained subtlety of his race in winding into the secrets of Lamb's personality. In these things Mr. Lucas is not strong; more especially his critical pagesthey are few in number-would seem to suffer from a tacit acceptance of Lamb as a great writer. Charming Lamb's work certainly was, fascinating in a way, and above all, like himself, lovable; but I cannot help feeling that the jealous pother of so many editors recently engaged on the same subject has tended to throw dust in our eyes. 1 Charles Lamb, sa vie et ses œuvres. Par Jules Derocquigny. Lille: Le Bigot Frères, 1904. The Life of Charles Lamb. By E. V. Lucas. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1905. 2 vols. Let us, if possible, hold fast to distinctions. To deal with his work as if it formed a body of literature great in any proper sense of the word is to place him among the small company of masterful spirits where his genius would only appear more tenuous by comparison, and it is to miss, I think, the truer source of enjoyment. Certainly, if we would extract the sweetness from Lamb's slender book of verse we must come to it with no such expectations as we should bring to the great poets. Lamb, in fact, writes as one who has "been enamour'd of rare poesy" rather than as one impelled himself to sing. Now and then-once at least in the dialogue between Margaret and Simon Woodvil-he echoes nobly nobly the larger utterance of the Elizabethans: To see the sun to bed, and to arise, Like some hot amourist with glowing eyes, Go eddying round; and small birds, how they fare, No doubt there is occasionally, as in the four |