Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen (Volume 2) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: WASHINGTON FRANKLIN. WASHINGTON. Well met again, my friend Benjamin ! Never did I see you, I think, in better health: Paris does not appear to have added a single day to your age. I hope the two years you have spent there for us, were spent as pleasantly to yourself as they have been advantageously to your country. FRANKLIN. Pleasantly they were spent indeed; but, you may well suppose, not entirely without anxiety. I thank God however that all this is over. WASHINGTON. Yes, Benjamin, let us render thanks to the disposer of events, under whom, by the fortitude, the wisdom, and the endurance of our Congress, the affairs of America are brought at last to a triumphant issue. FRANKLIN. Do not refuse the share of merit due to yourself, which is perhaps the largest. WASHINGTON. I am not of that opinion: if I were, I might acknowledge it to you, although not to others. Suppose me to have made a judicious choice in my measures: the Congress then made a judicious choice in me: so that whatever praise may be allowed me, is at best but secondary. FRANKLIN. I do not believe that the world contains so many men who reason rightly, as New England. Serious, religious, peaceable, inflexibly just and courageous, their stores of intellect are not squandered in the regions of fancy, or in the desperate ventures of new-found and foggy metaphysics, but warehoused and kept sound at home, and ready to be brought forth in good and wholesome condition at the first demand. Their ancestors had abandoned their estates, their families, and their country, for the obtainment of peace and freedom; and they themselves were ready to traverse the vast wildernesses of an unexplored continent, rather than submitt to that moral degradation, which alone can satisfy the capaciousn...