The Franklins were
relatively late comers to New England. They sprang from a long
line of blacksmiths at Ecton in Northamptonshire. The seat of the
Washingtons was not far away, and Franklin's latest biographer
points out that the pink-coated huntsmen of the Washington gentry
may often have stopped at Ecton to have their horses shod at the
Franklin smithy. Benjamin's father came out in 1685, more than
fifty years after the most notable Puritan emigration. Young
Benjamin, born in 1706, was as untouched by the ardors of that
elder generation as he would have been by the visions of
Dante--an author, by the way, whom he never mentions, even as he
never mentions Shakespeare. He had no reverence for Puritan New
England. To its moral beauty, its fine severity, he was wholly
blind. As a boy he thriftily sold his Pilgrim's "Progress." He
became, in the new fashion of that day, a Deist. Like a true
child of the eighteenth century, his attitude toward the
seventeenth was that of amused or contemptuous superiority.
Thackeray has somewhere a charming phrase about his own love for
the back seat of the stage-coach, the seat which, in the old
coaching days, gave one a view of the receding landscape.
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