Brave Men and Women | Page 9

General Washington had lost New York, and the prospects of the Revolution were gloomy in the extreme. Dr. Franklin was an old man of seventy, and might justly have asked to be excused from a service so perilous and fatiguing. But he did not. He went. And just before he sailed he got together all the money he could raise--about three thousand pounds--and invested it in the loan recently announced by Congress. This he did at a moment when few men had a hearty faith in the success of the Revolution. This he did when he was going to a foreign country that might not receive him, from which he might be expelled, and he have no country to return to. There never was a more gallant and generous act done by an old man.
In France he was as much the main stay of the cause of his country as General Washington was at home.
Returning home after the war, he was elected president of Pennsylvania for three successive years, at a salary of two thousand pounds a year. But by this time he had become convinced that offices of honor, such as the governorship of a State, ought not to have any salary attached to them. He thought they should be filled by persons of independent income, willing to serve their fellow-citizens from benevolence, or for the honor of it. So thinking, he at first determined not to receive any salary; but this being objected to, he devoted the whole of the salary for three years--six thousand pounds--to the furtherance of public objects. Part of it he gave to a college, and part was set aside for the improvement of the Schuylkill River.
Never was an eminent man more thoughtful of people who were the companions of his poverty. Dr. Franklin, from amidst the splendors of the French court, and when he was the most famous and admired person in Europe, forgot not his poor old sister, Jane, who was in fact dependent on his bounty. He gave her a house in Boston, and sent her every September the money to lay in her Winter's fuel and provisions. He wrote her the kindest, wittiest, pleasantest letters. "Believe me, dear brother," she writes, "your writing to me gives me so much pleasure that the great, the very great, presents you have sent me give me but a secondary joy."
How exceedingly absurd to call such a man "hard" and miserly, because he recommended people not to waste their money! Let me tell you, reader, that if a man means to be liberal and generous, he must be economical. No people are so mean as the extravagant, because, spending all they have upon themselves, they have nothing left for others. Benjamin Franklin was the most consistently generous man of whom I have any knowledge.
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III.
SIR WALTER SCOTT AND HIS MOTHER.
THE MOTHER'S EDUCATION--THE SON'S TRAINING--DOMESTIC LOVE AND SOCIAL DUTIES.
It was in the Spring of 1758 that the daughter of a distinguished professor of medicine in the University of Edinburgh changed her maiden name of Rutherford for her married name of Scott, having the happiness to unite her lot with one who was not only a scrupulously honorable man, but who, from his youth up, had led a singularly blameless life. Well does Coventry Patmore sing:
"Who is the happy husband? He, Who, scanning his unwedded life, Thanks Heaven, with a conscience free, 'Twas faithful to his future wife."
Such a husband as this was the father of Sir Walter Scott, a writer to the signet (or lawyer) in large practice in Edinburgh. He had never been led from the right way; and when the less virtuously inclined among the companions of his early life in Edinburgh found that they could not corrupt him, they ceased after a little while to laugh at him, and learned to honor him and to confide in him, "which is certainly," says he who makes the record on the authority of Mrs. Scott herself, "a great inducement to young men in the outset of life to act a similar part." It does not appear that old Walter Scott sought for beauty of person in his bride, though no doubt the face he loved was more beautiful to him than that of the bonniest belle in Scotland; but beauty of mind and disposition she certainly had. Of her father it is told that, when in practice as "a physician, he never gave a prescription without silently invoking on it the blessing of Heaven, and the piety which dictated the custom had been inherited by his daughter.
THE MOTHER'S' EDUCATION.
Mrs. Scott's education, also, had been an excellent one--giving, besides a good general grounding, an acquaintance with literature, and not neglecting "the more homely duties of the needle and the account-book." Her manners,