was not
familiar with it, and who did not consider him a friend to human kind.
When they spoke of him they seemed to think he was to restore the
Golden Age....

[Footnote 30: From a letter to the Boston _Patriot_ of May 15, 1811,
now given as an appendix to the "Works of John Adams." The differences
of Adams and Franklin form a striking incident in the biographies of
the two men. Colaborers as they were in a common cause, they had
constant disagreements as to methods while serving their country in
Europe. That they never openly quarreled Adams's biographer, John T.
Morse, attributes to "their sense of propriety and dignity, and to the
age and position of Dr. Franklin." The radical cause lay in the fact
that "they were utterly incompatible, both mentally and morally."]

Nothing perhaps that ever occurred upon this earth was so well
calculated to give any man an extensive and universal celebrity as the
discovery of the efficacy of iron points and the invention of
lightning-rods. The idea was one of the most sublime that ever entered
a human imagination that a mortal should disarm the clouds of heaven
and almost "snatch from his hand the scepter and the rod." The
ancients would have enrolled him with Bacchus and Ceres, Hercules and
Minerva....

Franklin had a great genius, original, sagacious, and inventive,
capable of discoveries in science no less than of improvements in the
fine arts and the mechanic arts. He had a vast imagination, equal to
the comprehension of the greatest objects, and capable of a steady and
cool comprehension of them. He had wit at will. He had humor that,
when he pleased, was delicate and delightful. He had a satire that was
good-natured or caustic, Horace or Juvenal, Swift or Rabelais, at his
pleasure. He had talents for irony, allegory, and fable, that he
could adapt with great skill to the promotion of moral and political
truth. He was master of that infantine simplicity which the French
call _naivete_, which never fails to charm, in Phaedrus and La
Fontaine, from the cradle to the grave.

Had he been blest with the same advantages of scholastic education in
his early youth, and pursued a course of studies as unembarrassed with
occupations of public and private life, as Sir Isaac Newton, he might
have emulated the first philosopher. Altho I am not ignorant that most
of his positions and hypotheses have been controverted, I can not but
think he has added much to the mass of natural knowledg