Pennsylvania Magazine of HISTORY and BIOGRAPHY

THE Pennsylvania Magazine OF HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY

Quaker Humanist James Logan as a Classical Scholar

HETHER on the banks of the Seine, the Thames, or the Delaware, intellectuals in the early eighteenth century Wtended to line up on one side or the other of the great battle of the books—the “quarrel of the ancients and moderns.” James Logan, Philadelphia's premier scholar, as well as her leading fur merchant and politician, stood with the defenders of the classics. "I confess, as I advance in years," he wrote in 1718, "the ancients still gain upon me, and the Greeks particularly. . . ."1 Not that he scorned contemporary literature or made light of modern science. On the contrary, he read the latest books of Addison and Steele, Pope and Gay, as soon as copies could reach America; and he not only appreciated the work of men like Newton, Huygens, and Linnaeus, but actually contributed to the progress of modern science through his own experiments and his patronage of young scientists like Benjamin Franklin, John Bartram, and Thomas Godfrey.2 Yet in

1 Logan to Josiah Martin, Oct. 26, 1718, Letter Book (1717-1731), 39, Logan Papers, The Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Unless otherwise specified, all Logan manuscripts here- after cited are in The Historical Society of Pennsylvania. I have modernized spelling and capi- talization in all quotations from manuscripts. 2 For Logan's knowledge of contemporary literature, see Frederick B. Tolles, Meeting House and Counting House: The Quaker Merchants of Colonial Philadelphia (Chapel Hill, N. C, 1948), 101-102; for his scientific work, see F. B. Tolles, "Philadelphia's First Scientist" in a forth- coming issue of Isis. 415 416 FREDERICK B. TOLLES October literature he always came back to the Greeks and Romans. As in science the bent of his mind was primarily mathematical, so in literary matters his tastes and critical standards were essentially classical.3 He was a belated Humanist, a distant spiritual cousin of Scaliger and Casaubon, Buchanan and Bentley. It is a little surprising, perhaps, to find North America's first pro- ductive classical scholar emerging from a Quaker background. The early Friends had set little store by classical learning, feeling with George Fox that it did not avail to "fit and qualify men to be minis- ters of Christ."4 Indeed some, like Thomas Lawson, the Quaker botanist, had attacked all "heathen learning," all studies based on "Lascivious Poems, Comedies, Tragedies, Frivolous Fables, Heathen Orations, Pagan Philosophy, Ethicks, Physicks, Metaphysick." Such learning, "being entertained in Christendom," Lawson had con- tended, only corrupted "Seriousness, Soundness, Solidity, and the Simplicity of Truth."5 But most Friends did not go so far as to reject all classical learning. A number of the early Quaker leaders in Eng- land and America—William Penn, Robert Barclay, George Keith, Francis Daniel Pastorius—had been men of liberal culture, at home in the languages and literatures of Greece and Rome. Such a man was James Logan's father, Patrick Logan, Master of Arts of Edinburgh University and teacher of the Friends school in Lurgan, Ireland. Young James learned "Latin, Greek, and some Hebrew" from his father before he was thirteen, and continued his studies in the Friends school at Bristol, England, where Patrick Logan served briefly in the early 1690's as Latin master. But beyond the rudiments he was largely self-educated. "Though I had my course of Humanity, as it is called,6 in Ireland from my father," he wrote, "I can safely say he never gave me the least instruction what- soever more than he gave to the other scholars."7 In 1693, when he 3 I should here acknowledge my indebtedness to an unpublished paper on Logan as a classicist by E. Gordon Alderfer, which confirmed my own convictions about Logan's qualities of mind. 4 John L. Nickalls, ed., The Journal of George Fox (Cambridge, 1952), 7. 5 A Mite into the Treasury (London, 1680), 41, 42. 6 "Learning or literature concerned with human culture . . . esp. the study of the ancient Latin and Greek classics. . . . (Still used in the Scottish Universities, in the sense of the Latin language and literature.)" New English Dictionary. 7 Autobiographical sketch in Logan Papers, II, 103. Logan probably learned more Latin than Greek from his father, if one can judge from the contents of Patrick Logan's library. A 1955 JAMES LOGAN, QUAKER HUMANIST 417 was not yet nineteen, he succeeded his father in Bristol as Latin master. While he taught the children of the Quaker burghers he continued his own education, building up a library of seven or eight hundred volumes and laying the foundation of what was to become "the most agreeable amusement of [his] life ... an acquaintance with ancient authors/'8 After a few years, tiring of a pedagogue's routine, he longed for a more exciting, more gainful career. He sold his library in Dublin, made a false start in trade, and finally, in 1699, agreed to go to the New World as secretary to William Penn, the proprietor of Pennsyl- vania. During the next ten years he had little time to pursue classical studies. As provincial secretary, proprietary agent, commissioner of property, and councilor, he found his hours and days crowded with duties as multifarious as they were exhausting.9 But a visit to Eng- land in 1710-1711 revived his zest for learning. He started buying books again—books of science, philosophy, theology, history, contemporary literature—but always the Greek and Roman classics. From his return to Philadelphia in 1712 to the end of his long life, nearly forty years later, he never ceased adding to his library, never ceased reading and studying the classics. His leisure for study was limited, for in that period he came to dominate Pennsylvania's fur trade, her politics, and her Indian diplomacy; he was for seven years the province's chief justice and, for a brief but eventful term, her acting governor. But no matter how deeply involved he was in the active life, his heart was always with his books, his instincts always those of a scholar. "It may appear strange to thee, perhaps," he wrote in 1721 to a correspondent in Hamburg from whom he had ordered some classical texts, "to find an American bearskin merchant troubling himself with such books, but they have been my delight

manuscript catalogue of the books he owned in 1688 is in the Loganian Library at the Library Company of Philadelphia (bound with a copy of Robert Clavel's General Catalogue of Books Printed in England . . . [London, 1675]). It lists one hundred sixty "Latin books," but only twenty-three "Greek books," including a high proportion of lexicons and grammars. I am in- debted to Mr. Edwin Wolf 2nd for calling this to my attention and for other favors. 8 Logan to Timothy Forbes, Jan. 3, 1725/6, Letter Books, III, 49; Logan to Edward Hacket, July 31, 1720, ibid., II, 223. 9 See Albright G. Zimmerman, "James Logan, Proprietary Agent," The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (PMHB), LXXVIII (1954), 143-176, for a detailed account of his work as William Penn's steward. There is no adequate biography of Logan in print. 418 FREDERICK B. TOLLES October and . . . will, I believe, continue my best entertainment in my ad- vancing years." And to another correspondent in Amsterdam: "I confess a book has from my infancy been my diversion, and serves me agreeably to spend my vacant hours. This humor has led me to furnish myself with most of the ancient authors, Greek and Latin, yet I still want some or better editions than those I have."10 It was no idle boast when, near the end of his life, he described his library as containing "above one hundred volumes of authors, in folio, all in Greek . . . [and] all the Roman classics, without excep- tion."11 The titles are all listed in the Catalogus bibltothecae J£j)gan- ianae of 1760 and the books themselves—the tall folios, the massive quartos, the octavos and smaller volumes—stand in impressive array on their shelves in the Library Company of Philadelphia, newly re- habilitated, catalogued, and arranged as befits the greatest of all American colonial libraries. No superficial description or analysis, no mere sampling of authors, titles, and editions, no comparisons with other early Ameri- can book collections can do more than suggest the amazing richness of Logan's classical library. According to my calculations,12 it contained a hundred and thirty-one titles in Greek literature (including poets, dramatists, orators, historians, philosophers, and scientists), one hundred and thirty-six in Roman literature, and thirty-three collections or anthologies, a total of three hundred classical titles. These figures include only works in the original tongues. In addi- tion, Logan had twenty-three translations into English, French, Italian, or German. He had, moreover, no less than a hundred and

10 Logan to Frederick Schomaker, Nov. 14, 1721, Letter Book (1717-1731), 215; Logan to Theodorus Hodson, Dec. 12, 1726, ibid., 451. 11 This description appears in varying language in his will (see First Supplement to the Catalogue of Books Belonging to the Loganian Library [Philadelphia, 1867], x); in a letter to Peter Collinson, July 1, 1749 (Jared Sparks, ed., Works of Benjamin Franklin [Boston, 1840], VII, 39 [note]); and in Franklin's Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1749), 8-9 (note). 12 No two people in analyzing a library will count in precisely the same fashion, a fact which makes meaningful comparisons all but impossible. I choose to count by titles, no matter how many separate works or how many volumes a single title may cover. Thus, for example, the complete opera of Virgil counts as one title, even though it includes the Aeneid, the ten Eclogues, and the four Georgics, and runs to three volumes. I count each distinct edition, however, as a separate title. 1955 JAMES LOGAN, QUAKER HUMANIST 4I9 eighteen lexicons, grammars, works on paleography, criticism, and the like.13 No significant classical writer was missing, and of the most important ones Logan had not only the most recent scholarly editions, but also the best of the older ones. All the Greek poets were there from Homer (seven editions) and Hesiod (two) to Oppian and Quintus Smyrnaeus; the dramatists (three editions of Aeschylus, two of Aristophanes, two of Euripides, three of Sophocles); the philosophers (four complete editions of Aristotle and two of Plato, besides many separate works). The Roman poets and dramatists were there from Plautus to Claudian (with four editions of Virgil, six of Horace, four of Ovid); the Roman historians and philosophers from Cato to Macrobius; nearly all the minor writers of the late Roman empire— Justinus, Eutropius, Ammianus Marcellinus, Aulus Gellius, even such unquakerly writers as Lucius Apuleius and Petronius Arbiter. In short, the Loganian Library, as it was named after Logan made it over to the city of Philadelphia, contained beyond question the largest and finest collection of classical writings in colonial America. Much has been made of the humanistic culture of Logan's contempo- raries among the wealthier Virginia planters. The best classical library in Virginia, William Byrd's at Westover, was, to be sure, a close rival to Logan's in size, but it was a gentleman's, not a scholar's, collection; though Byrd's diaries show him to have been a reader of the classics in the original tongues, he was not a close student of the ancient texts and there is little reason to assume that he was familiar with the contents of all the books in his library. The man who is described as the Old Dominion's best classical scholar, Richard Lee II of Mount Pleasant, owned no more than thirty-six "standard works of the Greek and Roman writers," some of them doubtless in translation.14 Even at Harvard College where, we are told, the classical

13 I have based my count on the Catalogus bibliothecae Loganianae (Philadelphia, 1760). Besides the classical writers, Logan had most of the Church Fathers and more than fifty Humanist writers of the Renaissance. Logan's classical books are full of his critical and bibliographical notes, usually in Greek or Latin. A final estimate of his scholarly attainments can be made only on the basis of a full study of these notes, a study which I have not undertaken. 14 Louis B. Wright, The First Gentlemen of Virginia (San Marino, Calif., 1940), 130, 223- 224> 333*335- See also L. B. Wright, "The Classical Tradition in Colonial Virginia," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, XXXIII (1939), 85-97. 42.O FREDERICK B. TOLLES October languages and literatures were intensively studied from the beginning, the library after a century of existence contained barely half the number of classical works that Logan's did and nothing like the pro- fusion of scholarly editions.15 It was no small achievement to have assembled so complete and distinguished a classical library in a little provincial Quaker town three thousand miles from the sources of books. Logan had ranged far and wide in his quest for classical texts. On his two trips to Eng- land, in 1710-1711 and 1724, he spent hours ransacking the London bookstalls for rare and scholarly editions. Sitting in his house on Second Street or, later, in the great library at Stenton, he pored over the catalogues of Bateman, Osborne, Innys, all the dealers in learned books, made out his orders with the special anticipatory elation known only to the bibliophile—and then waited six months, a year, two years, for the books to come. He exercised the bookbuyer's im- memorial privilege of complaining (fruitlessly, of course) about the prices.16 He employed two of his learned friends as "scouts" to seek out books for him in London—Josiah Martin, an erudite Quaker, and the Reverend William Reading, Librarian of Sion College. Occasion- ally, he could obtain books close at hand, as when he exchanged some Latin translations for the Greek texts of Xenophon, Herodotus, Polybius, Thucydides, Aeschylus, Pindar, and Lycophron with a Philadelphia Quaker who could not read Greek; or when he got his friend James Alexander to buy a number of classical authors at the auction of Colonel John Montgomerie's library in New York in 1732.17 But sometimes he had to stretch his net much farther. For- tunately, he had business correspondents in Dublin, Amsterdam, and Hamburg, and could set them to work scouring the book market for a particular rare edition. Thus, by one means or another, he brought together in Philadel- phia a classical library unequaled in the New World. On his death he left it to the people of his adopted city. An Englishman, visiting the Loganian Library half a century later, could not repress his amaze- is The Catalogus librorum bibliothecae collegii Harvardini (Boston, 1723) with its supple- ments (1725 and 1735) lists approximately sixty Greek and sixty Latin titles, exclusive of grammars and translations. 16 Logan to Christopher Bateman, Nov. 15, 1721, Letter Book (1717-1731), 225. 17 Logan to William Masters, Feb. 9, 1730/1, Letter Books, IV, 224; Logan to Alexander, June 8, 1732, Letter Book (1731-1732), 64. 1955 JAMES LOGAN, QUAKER HUMANIST 421 ment at the literary riches he saw. Logan's soul, he exclaimed, de- served to be "admitted to the company of the congenial spirits of a Cosmo and J^prenzo of aMedicis. The Greek and Roman authors for- gotten on their native banks of the Ilyssus and Tiber, delight by the kindness of a Xj)gan the votaries to learning on those of the T>ela- ware."ls The motive which drove Logan to acquire this magnificent classical library was not, however, a concern for the education of posterity, nor was it simply the bibliomaniac's passion for collecting or the wealthy merchant's urge for conspicuous consumption. This was a scholar's working library. Logan was not only a constant reader of the classical writers, who wove their ideas into the fabric of his own thought, but a close student of their texts, whose critical observations were of interest to scholars in Europe, a fluent writer in both Greek and Latin, and a translator, whose English version of one ancient work went through half a dozen editions in Great Britain and America. It must be confessed that there were limits to Logan's appreciation of the ancient writers. He was, after all, a Quaker and had the Quaker's inbred prejudice against works of the imagination, especially the drama. The great Quaker apologist Robert Barclay had dismissed all comedy as "a studied complex of idle and lying words," and even the high seriousness of tragedy could hardly redeem it in Quaker eyes from the charge that it violated simplicity and integrity by counterfeiting the emotions. Barclay, on the other hand, had given his sanction to the "innocent divertisement" of reading history.19 So Logan was running true to type when he wrote his bookseller protesting against the cost of an Aeschylus, whose works con- sisted "but of seven crabbed tragedies of no great use," and at the same time expressing willingness to pay high prices for Polybius, Diodorus Siculus, and Dio Cassius because "these are valuable historians in themselves."20 His explanation of why the classics were his favorite reading is revealing: "as they give us the only old accounts of time [besides the Scriptures] I am pleased to observe what the

!8 John Davis, Travels of Four Years and a Half in the United States of America (London, 1803), 40-41. 19 Apology for the True Christian Divinity, Prop. XI, sees, viii, ix. Cf. Ezra K. Maxfield, "Friendly Testimony Concerning Stage Plays," Bulletin of Friends Historical Association, XIV (1925), 13-21, 53-61. 20 Logan to C. Bateman, Nov. 15, 1721, Letter Book (1717-1731), 225. 422 FREDERICK B. TOLLES October notions of men were at the greatest distance from me; for this reason Homer and Hesiod please me more than ever [and] Herodotus also diverts me with some others. . . ."21 We can form some notion of what Roman authors Logan considered most valuable from the list of books he ordered in 1720 for William Masters, a young Philadelphia Friend who took "delight in his learning": Livy ("the new Oxford edition, if published; if not, the 1703 London edition or the 1679 Elzevir"), Cicero and Caesar (both in Tonson's edition), Quintus Curtius, Suetonius, Tacitus, Velleius Paterculus, Cornelius Nepos, Aulus Gellius, Eutropius, Justin, Pliny, Ammianus Marcellinus, Seneca, Boethius, Lucan, Statius, Martial, Claudian, Silius Italicus. One notes the predominance of historians, the unrepresentative nature of the poets (who seem to be added as a kind of afterthought), the absence of Ovid, Horace, Catullus, Propertius and Juvenal, the more sensuous and "heathenish" writers.22 But these are writers recommended for a boy's education. Logan in his own reading ranged over the whole corpus of Greek and Roman literature, made it so much his own that he was seldom at a loss for a suitable classical tag. Did his friend Governor Burnet of New York take a wife? Logan congratulated him in lines from Catullus' epithalamium23: Quid datur a divis felici optatius hora? Hymen o Hymenaee, Hymen ades o Hymenaee. Did he seek words to express his impatience with Dean Berkeley's metaphysics ? He translated some lines from the oijax of Sophocles24: The Prophet thus, the rash presumptuous mind That while to human state by Heav'n confin'd Would leap his Pale and break the destin'd bounds With pointed vengeance injured Heav'n confounds Or to delusive whims the fool betrays Condemn'd to rove in Error's endless maze.

21 Logan to Josiah Martin, Oct. 26, 1718, ibid., 39. 22 Logan to Bateman, Dec. 3, 1720, ibid,, 162. Of course, it is likely that young Masters had encountered Horace and perhaps Ovid in school, even in the Philadelphia Friends Public School. 23 Logan to William Burnet, May 25, 1721, Letter Books, III, 14. 24 Logan to Samuel Blunston, Jan. 11, 1735/6, Charles F. Jenkins Autograph Collection, Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College. 1955 JAMES LOGAN, QUAKER HUMANIST 423 Did he suffer obloquy and slander from his political enemies? He found solace and reassurance in recalling Persius' lines (Satires, II, 11. 71-74) on purity of heart and duty to God and man; in repeating Horace's Justum et tenacem propositi virum (Odes, III, iii), or his resolution (Odes, III, xxix) to wrap himself in his virtue, should Fortune forsake him, and seek honest poverty without dowry.25 Or did he long to retire from active life to his "plantation" on the German town Road? Lucretius' lofty words (at the beginning of the second book of the T>e rerum naturd) in which he speaks of look- ing down on those poor mortals who were still wandering about, seeking the true path of life, came naturally to his mind.26 On his Sabine farm at Stenton, surrounded by his Greek and Roman authors, Logan matured a serene classical philosophy of life compounded of Stoic resignation and Horatian detachment, the very philosophy that Howard Mumford Jones has recently described as the typical American conception of the good life in the eighteenth century.27 No one in Quaker Philadelphia, no one in the American colonies could match Logan's zeal for classical studies, his broad and intimate knowledge of ancient texts. To find fellow scholars capable of discussing problems of criticism or interpretation on his level he had to look abroad. He found a kindred spirit in Josiah Martin, an English Quaker with whom he carried on a long and learned correspondence. Martin was master of many languages, though, unlike Logan, he used his learning chiefly to advance Quakerism. When Voltaire, in 1733, published his jQetters Concerning the English Nation, with their half-mocking, half-admiring (and not more than three-quarters accurate) comments on the Quakers, it was Martin who leaped into print to correct his errors. When Logan read his pamphlet, zA J^etter from One of the 'People Called Quakers to Francis de "Voltaire Occasioned by His Remarks on That "People . . . , he immediately noticed and called to his friend's attention a mistranslation from Plato's Republic. When Martin published his next book, an English version of Fenelon's "Dissertation on Pure J^pve with a lengthy "apologetic preface," he quoted the same passage from Plato, this time using

25 Logan to Harry Brooke, [Nov. 24?], 1725, Letter Books, III, 38-39. 26 Logan to Edward Hacket, July 31, 1720, ibid., II, 78. 27 The Pursuit of Happiness (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), 64-80. 424 FREDERICK B. TOLLES October Logan's translation.28 The two Quaker scholars kept up their correspondence for more than two decades, happily discussing across the broad Atlantic the shortcomings of the Greek etymologies in Ephraim Chambers' new Cyclopedia, the interpretation of a passage in Clement of Alexandria, the accuracy of Pope's translation of the Odyssey.™ Logan had a much more distinguished transatlantic correspondent in Professor Johann Albert Fabricius of Hamburg, one of the most encyclopedically learned classical scholars of that or any other age. Fabricius was the author or editor of no less than a hundred and twenty-eight works. Most notable was his monumental ^Bibliotheca Qraeca^ a historical and bibliographical work which has been called maximus antiquae eruditionis thesaurus and which still forms the basis for all histories of Greek literature.30 Logan owned and studied carefully its fourteen volumes, though he complained to Josiah Martin that the indefatigable compiler had "much abused the world in lengthening it needlessly."31 It was his double interest in astronomy and ancient authors that brought Logan into correspondence with Fabricius. Reading the notes on Ptolemy in the Bibliotheca Qraeca^ he was struck by the fact that the earliest complete edition of the ^Almagest mentioned there was the Greek editto princeps published in Basel in 1538. Now Logan himself had once owned a Latin version, translated from the Arabic and published at Venice in 1515. Unfortunately, he had sold it with the rest of his books in Dublin before coming to America. He set his friends and business agents to work hunting for another copy in England, but they could not locate one for him. Nevertheless, con- vinced that he was correct, he ventured to write to Fabricius in his best Latin, faithfully observing all the conventions of academic correspondence—the effusive flattery, the exaggerated humility and self-depreciation.

28 Martin to Logan, Mar. 6, 1733/4, Logan Papers, X, 50; Sept. 8, 1735, ibid., II, $5. The word in question was kirbcovpos, which Martin first translated "watchmen," but later, after hearing from Logan, corrected to "helpers." 29 Logan to Martin, Oct. 6, 1728, Letter Books, III, 226; Apr. 2, 1732, Letter Book (1731- 1732), 48a; Sept. 8, 1735, Logan Papers, II, 55. 30 John Edwin Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship (Cambridge, 1903-1908), III, 2-3. 31 Logan to Martin, Oct. 26, 1718, Letter Book (1717-1731), 40. He also owned Fabricius' Bibliotheca Latina, his Bibliotheca Latina mediae et infimae aetatis, and his Bibliotheca antiquaria. 1955 JAMES LOGAN, QUAKER HUMANIST 425 "While from all sides, most learned sir/' he wrote, "your sacred studies in promoting literature are interrupted by the sons of the muses and the priests of the mysteries, there can hardly be one or two perhaps from these American regions who claim your attention. Therefore, allow me, since what is strange and distant wins esteem not on account of its worth but because it is unusual, to address you from the wilds of Pennsylvania." After introducing himself as a student of the classics condemned for twenty years to the counting- house and the provincial council chamber, he spoke of his admiration for the works of Ptolemy, of his certainty that a prior Latin version of the Almagest existed, of his fruitless efforts to obtain it, of his failure to locate even the 1538 Basel edition. With the letter he sent a dozen small skins {pelliculas duodenas) from his warehouse as a present to the learned professor. Fabricius' reply has not survived. We only know that he testified to the rarity of the Greek edition, observing that copies were not to be had in Europe for prayer or price {nee prece nee pretio parabilis). Then one day, out of the blue, the book arrived in Philadelphia addressed to Logan. It was the professor's own copy of the Basel edition, the very volume, incidentally, that had previously belonged to the eminent classicist Johann Friedrich Gronovius—a gift to the unknown bearskin merchant who studied the Greeks on the edge of the American wilderness. Logan acknowledged the priceless present with the most suitable token in his gift—"an Indian dressed buffalo skin with the wool on."32 Encouraged by the warmth of Fabricius1 response, Logan made bold to send him some comments on the texts of Euclid to supplement the notes in the second volume of the Hibliotheca Cfraeca. His comments were based on the Latin edition of 1516, which contained Campanus' translation of the Elements from the Arabic and Zam- berti's from the Greek. Logan was especially concerned to vindicate the Arab scientists from the aspersions of Dr. John Freind, the medi-

32 Logan to Fabricius, Nov. 11, 1721, Letter Books, III, 20-22; Logan to F. Schomaker, [Apr. 8, 1723], Letter Book (1717-1731), 310; Logan to Peter Collinson, July 1, 1749, Works of Franklin, VII, 39 (note). The 1538 Ptolemy with Fabricius' and Gronovius' signatures in it is still in the Loganian Library. Logan, incidentally, continued his search for the 1515 edition and finally succeeded in locating a copy—the very one he had sold in Dublin in 1698. It too is now in the Loganian Library, with Logan's note, "liber rarissimus" on the title page. 4^6 FREDERICK B. TOLLES October cal historian. He himself had studied the thirteenth-century Arabic redaction of the Clements made by Nasir al-din and considered it a distinguished work (praeclarum opus)y though he was prepared to admit that the Arabs fell far short of the Greeks in originality. (He had a typical scholar's complaint, incidentally, to make of the Arabic lexicons in his library: they were full of terms relating to camels and the culture of date palms, but omitted most of the mathematical terms he needed in his studies.) How Fabricius reacted to these observations we do not know, but they seemed important enough to Hermann Samuel Reimarus, the great scholar's son-in-law, to war- rant inclusion in his Commentarius de vita et scriptis Io. aAlb. Fabricii, which appeared in Hamburg in 1737, the year after Fabricius' death.33 From Ptolemy and Euclid it was natural for Logan to turn back to Pythagoras. He had in his library an edition of Iamblichus' J£ife of 'Pythagoras edited by Joannes Arcerius and published at Heidelberg in 1598. He also had the more recent versions of Ludolf Kiister and Ulrich Obrecht. Comparing them, he found a great number of dis- crepancies, which he wished to call to Fabricius' attention. He labo- riously copied out the variant readings and sent them with his comments to Hamburg in December, 1735. It was his last letter to his learned friend, for Fabricius died in April of the following year. But Logan's labors were not lost. Somehow his textual comments came into the hands of a classical philologist in Amsterdam, Jacques Philippe d'Orville, who published them in 1740 in his zMiscellaneae observationes criticae novae in auctores veteres et recentioresy a scholarly publication which was read all over Europe.34 The world of learning has never known national boundaries. No- where has the sense of belonging to an international community been stronger than among the scientists and the classical scholars—the one group dedicated to investigating a common natural universe, the other to exploring a common intellectual heritage. We are beginning

33 Commentarius . . ., 291-295. Logan is here called Johannes (instead of Jacobus) Logan, and opposite the marginal note "Loganus quisf there is a brief biographical sketch, based on information from Logan's letters. 34 Miscellaneae observationes criticae novae . . . , 91-112. Though mentioned in several nineteenth-century accounts of Logan's writings (e.g., John F. Watson's Annals of Philadelphia [Philadelphia, 1857], I, 526), this Epistola ad virum clarissimum Joannem Albertum Fabricium has long eluded identification. 1955 JAMES LOGAN, QUAKER HUMANIST 427 to recognize the existence of an "Atlantic community" of mind and spirit in the eighteenth century, a common, mutually interactive civilization in Europe and America.35 As scientist and classical scholar, James Logan was surely one of its first citizens. Of Logan's facility as a Latinist we have many examples in his correspondence and his scientific writings; of his command of Greek hardly any.36 Yet we have his own testimony that he often amused himself by composing Greek verses. On one notable occasion he used his skill to win a victory over a supercilious New Englander. When he was in London in 1710 and 1711 on proprietary business, he spent much of his time in Buckingham Court in the chambers of Richard West (later counsel to the Board of Trade and author of Hecuba: zA Tragedy). Here, where William Penn made his headquarters when he came up from his countryseat at Ruscombe, Logan met Jeremiah Dummer, newly appointed agent for Massachusetts Bay. Dummer was a graduate of Harvard with a doctorate from the University of Ley den, and something of a learned prig. Having gathered from Penn that Logan had some pretensions to learning, he plotted to expose the Quaker's ignorance, to make him look ridiculous. A friend in the country, he said, had just lost a daughter and wanted a Latin epitaph for her gravestone. Would Logan help him out by composing one? Logan suspected the Yankee's motive, and resolved to outwit him. He accepted the assignment, and next morning left at West's lodg- ings "four Qreek verses for the epitaph and four Latin ones to excuse [his] writing in Greek." So, at least, he recalled his triumph many years later.37 Logan's friendship with Brigadier Robert Hunter, the cultivated and able royal governor of New York and New Jersey, led to further essays in Greek verse. Hunter, the friend of Dr. Arbuthnot and Dean Swift, the Eboracensis of one of Steele's cTatler papers, the author of

35 See Michael Kraus, The Atlantic Civilization: Eighteenth-Century Origins (Ithaca, N.Y., 1949). 36 Except for the notes in his books, occasional Greek phrases in his Latin correspondence, and several curious passages in his business letters in which, to frustrate prying eyes, he con- veyed certain details of his private affairs (for example, the size of his fortune) in that language. Logan to Dr. William Logan, Feb. 12, 1731/2, Letter Book (1731-1732), 37; Nov. [6?], 1733, Letter Books, IV, 357. 37 Logan to Thomas Penn, Nov. [24?], 1749, Logan Papers, X, 94. For Dummer, see Clifford K. Shipton, Sibley's Harvard Graduates (Cambridge, Mass., 1933), IV, 454-468. 428 FREDERICK B. TOLLES October the first play printed in America, was a man of learning and wit, "a gentleman of as refined a taste/' Logan conceived, "as any we have known or perhaps heard of in America."38 In his leisure Hunter diverted himself by turning out Latin odes for his friends. Logan, who often visited him at Perth Amboy, admired these productions immoderately and longed to reciprocate somehow in kind. One winter day in 1717, as he was sailing down the Delaware from Burlington, idly reading in Homer's Odyssey ("his tales in that poem," he thought, "being rather more agreeable than his Iliads"), a sudden "crotchet" seized him to turn Hunter's latest ode into Greek. With the help of Scapula's lexicon, he wrote out a translation of several strophes, stumbling only occasionally over words like lemures and credulitas for which he could find no Greek equivalent. The quantities, he confessed, when he sent the unfinished translation to Hunter, were not all as precise as he would have them, but he excused himself by pointing out that "few of the ancients are so nice—Homer and Hesiod especially." It was nearly a year before he found time to finish his version. His philosophy of translation was a rigorous one: "I ever thought," he wrote, "that the best [versions] were such as kept closest to the original, expressing at the same time the thought in a full propriety of the language translated into." Out on his farm on the Germantown Road (S ten ton mansion was not built yet), he sometimes resorted to a kind of literary pump-priming to start the flow of poetic inspiration. "Going over ... to my plantation three nights ago," he wrote in midsummer of 1718, "I took a Greek author with me to try whether with that as water I could pump up any more." Finally, just before Christmas, he polished off the translation and sent it to Hunter. The last two strophes, he admitted, were weak; still, they were perhaps as good as some verses that were "sung in the great house in the Hay- market, where sound more than sense prevails."39 Logan sometimes tried his hand at Latin verse, too. On Hunter's departure for England in 1719 he composed a valedictory ode (now

38 Logan to Harry Brooke, Mar. 22, 1718/19, Letter Books, II, 204. The unique copy of Hunter's Androboros ([New York], 1714), a bawdy farce dealing with provincial politics, is in the Huntington Library. 39 Logan to Hunter, Feb. 17, 1717/18, Letter Books, II, 173-174; Mar. 5, 1717/18, ibid,, 175-176; July 10, 1718, ibid., 178-179; Dec. 23, 1718, ibid., 200. 1955 JAMES LOGAN, QUAKER HUMANIST 429 lost) which was handed around in the governor's circle at New York until Logan finally wrote and asked that it go no farther and by no means be published.40 One of his Latin poems has survived. It is an elegy for his infant daughter Rachel, who died in July, 1723, at the age of eleven months. The morning after her death, as he wandered disconsolately into his library, his eye fell upon a poem of Daniel Heinsius, the Dutch Humanist, a Greek hexastich written to be pre- fixed to Heinsius' T)e contemptu mortis. He wrote out a translation of Heinsius' lines, and then, wishing to express his grief in his own words, composed some fluent and touching elegiac couplets, com- mencing41: Sis licet in teneris abrepta parentibus annis Vita exempta prius quam videare frui, At patris et matris pleno praecordia tangit Ictu discessus, cara puella, tuus. Logan's minor, rather specialized contributions to classical scholarship were known only to a small circle of savants in Europe; his writings in Latin and Greek were intended only for the circle of his friends. But his translations from Latin to English, though intended in the first instance only for his family and close friends, became widely known in the eighteenth century through the enter- prise of Benjamin Franklin. By a perverse twist of fate they are known today primarily as examples of Franklin's printing art, and one of them by a bit of chicanery—not Franklin's—has actually cir- culated as the product of his pen. For fourteen centuries schoolboys had learned their Latin from the "Distichs of Cato," a collection of moral saws of uncertain 40 Logan to Hunter, July 9, 1719, ibid., 215; Logan to R. Jenney (Chaplain of the fort at New York), Aug. 6,1719, ibid., 116-217. 41 Torn from a home that held thee dear While years were tender, grief unknown, Leaving thy parents sad and lone To drop the silent, mindful tear. The original manuscript of Logan's translation is found on a flyleaf at the end of his copy of Heinsius (which, incidentally, was a gift from his friend Hunter). He also transcribed it in a letter to his brother Dr. William Logan of Bristol, England, July 21, 1723, which is in the Gulielma M. Howland Collection, Haverford College Library. It was printed by Amelia Mott Gummere in "James Logan as a Poet," PMHB, XXVII (1903), 337-339, with an English translation by Rpchard] M[otrj G[ummere], from which the above quatrain is quoted. 43O FREDERICK B. TOLLES October authorship. Logan turned them into English couplets for his own amusement during his early years in America (or possibly during his English visit in 1710-1711). Twenty-five years later, he picked up his unfinished translation and completed it, no doubt for his own children (Sarah, the oldest, would have been fifteen in 1730; James, the youngest, would have been two).42 The Latin, being naturally of the simplest, presented no problem, though it was no easy task, he found, "to comprize the Sense of two Latin Hexameters in twenty Syllables in English, with a smooth Cadence, and tagg'd with a strong Rhime."43 Nevertheless, he achieved remarkable success in duplicat- ing the pithy didacticism of the Latin original44: Act not thy self what thou are wont to blame; When Teachers slip themselves, 'tis double Shame. While in Old-age you others Conduct tell, Think whether in your Youth your own was well. Logan knew that the author of these apothegms was no Christian; he accepted Scaliger's guess that he was an unconverted gentile of perhaps the early third century, and added his own observation that "Cato" was apparently a follower of Pythagoras and the Platonists. Accordingly, he felt constrained to add a line here and there to im- prove his pagan author's morality. For example, after translating Him who is kind in Words but false in Heart In his own Coin repay, with Art for Art, he added: [Yet with unblemisti d Honour act thy cPart\

42 A letter now at Stenton, addressed to Susanna Wright and dated Dec. 19, 1735, speaks of his having had a rough draft of the first two books among his papers for about twenty-five years before it entered his head to complete the work. A manuscript of the translation, with corrections in Logan's hand, is in the Gulielma M. Howland Collection in the Haverford College Library. 43 Catos Moral Distichs Englished in Couplets (Philadelphia, 1735), vi. 44 Ibid., 9, 10. The author of the latest scholarly translation, incidentally, takes over many of Logan's versions word for word, though he does not name him as the source and apparently does not know him as the translator of the 1735 edition. Wayland J. Chase, The Distichs of Cato: A Famous Medieval Textbook [University of Wisconsin Studies in the Social Sciences] (Madison, Wis., 1922). 1955 JAMES LOGAN, QUAKER HUMANIST 431 And at the end, feeling a need for a final edifying epigram, he tacked a third line onto the last distich45:

If couch'd in two flat Lines each Precept lies, Yet brief and strong the Sense; let this suffice; [Sound pleases Fools, but 'Truth and Sense the Wise.]

A copy of Logan's translation "happened" into the hands of Philadelphia's most enterprising publisher. The author of 'Poor TZjchard's ^Almanac liked its "Precepts of Morality, contained in such short and easily-remember'd Sentences." Logan agreed to let him print it on condition that he refrain from revealing the translator's identity. Regretfully, Franklin accepted the condition, and described the text as the work of a "Gentleman amongst us (whose Name or Character I am strictly forbid to mention, tho' it might give some Advantage to my Edition)."46 A detailed comparison of Poor Richard's proverbs with Logan's translation of the "Distichs of Cato," however, might show that Franklin did after all derive some incidental advantage from it.47 Nine years later, Franklin published another Logan translation, his version of Cicero's defense of old age, the T>e senectute, sometimes called Cato zJftCajor. Logan had made it in late 1733 or early 173448 "for the Entertainment of a friend less skilled in the language or the history of Rome." (This friend, according to Franklin, was "a Neighbour then in his grand Climacteric."49 Tradition has identified

45 Cato's Moral Distichs, 10, 23. 46 Ibid., "The Printer to the Reader," iii. Logan's translation has been reprinted in part in The Philobiblion, II (1863), 27-30, and in full by the Book Club of California (San Francisco, 1939), with a foreword by Carl Van Doren. 47 Chase, II, says, without elaborating or citing proof, that "Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac . . . gives internal evidence of having received influence from that source." 48 Logan himself wrote Franklin, early in 1744, that it had been done "ten years since, in the sixtieth year of my life." Logan to Franklin, Feb. 26, 1743/4, American Philosophical Society. This statement was incorporated at Logan's request in the printer's preface to the reader. One further bit of circumstantial evidence tends to corroborate this dating: on Mar. 24, 1733/4 Logan ordered from England a copy of Samuel Hemming's translation of the Cato Major (Oxford, 1716). Letter Books, IV, 388. The book probably never arrived, however, for it does not appear in the 1760 catalogue of his library and he told Franklin (letter cited above) that he had never seen an English version. 49 M. T. Cicero's Cato Major (Philadelphia, 1744), "The Printer to the Reader," iii. 432 FREDERICK B. TOLLES October him as Isaac Norris, who lived at Fairhill, not far from Stenton, and who was in his sixty-third year—the "grand climacteric"—in 1733- 1734.) For this friend's benefit, and with no thought of publication, Logan had prepared an elaborate set of historical notes to accompany the English text. Franklin saw the manuscript four or five years after its completion and got Logan's consent to publish it, this time without any stipulation of anonymity.50 Franklin's printing shop had a crowded schedule during the next few years, however—he was issuing the "Pennsylvania Qazette, Poor %ichard> and the (generalzJxCagazine> as well as a variety of books—and it was not until the winter of 1743- 1744 that he had time to set it up in type. He advertised it for sale in April, 1744.51

iM. T. Cicero's Cato Major; ory His "Discourse of Old

50 Logan to Peter Collinson, Oct. 13, 1745, quoted in Elizabeth P. Smith, ed., Recollections of John Jay Smith (Philadelphia, 1892), 230. 51 Logan to Thomas Penn, Mar. 6, 1743/4, Letter Books, IV, 446; Pennsylvania Gazette\ Apr. 5, 1744. 52 Cato Major, "The Printer to the Reader," v. 63 Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1938), 103; John C. Oswald, Benjamin Franklin, Printer (n. p., 1917), 84; William J. Campbell, comp., The Collection of Franklin Imprints in the Museum of the Curtis Publishing Company (Philadelphia, 1918), 83. Mr. Lawrence Wroth is one of the few dissenters; he considers the Cato Major an "excursion" from Franklin's usual design, less successful than "the general run of his governmental publications." "Benjamin Franklin: The Printer at Work," Meet Dr. Franklin (Philadelphia, 1943), 174. 1955 JAMES LOGAN, QUAKER HUMANIST 433 with many others . . . and be a happy Omen that Philadelphia shall become the Seat of the American Muses."54 In style, subject matter, and philosophy, no work could have been more congenial to Logan than the T)e senectute of Cicero. Emerson once described it as "charming by its uniform rhetorical merit; heroic with Stoical precepts, with a Roman eye to the claims of the State; happiest perhaps in his praise of life on the farm; and rising at the conclusion to a lofty strain/'55 At sixty, like Cicero's Cato at eighty- four, Logan could look back over an active life of service to the state. Though now entering upon old age and obliged to hobble about on crutches, he was far from senility or decrepitude. Pennsylvanians still looked to him as an elder statesman, turned to him almost in- stinctively for counsel and direction; indeed, within a few years they would call him back into active service during the turbulent and difficult years of the "Conojacular War" and the "Walking Pur- chase." His philosophy of life had always been a kind of iron Stoicism, and in his retirement to his farm at Stenton he was able to give himself over at last to philosophical reflection. When the venerable Roman censor defends old age to his young friends Scipio and Laelius, shows how it need not disable men from public business, how bodily infirmity need not impair the mind's vitality, how old age has its own special pleasures, and how death is merely its fitting and natural close, the gateway to immortality—when Cato expresses these views, he says no more than what Logan in his mellow later years believed with all his heart. Logan's normal English prose style was crabbed, tortuous, pedestrian. But under the influence of Cicero's lucid eloquence he achieved a clarity and an easy grace which one finds nowhere else in his writings. The sentences are relatively simple and clear, the style

54 Cato Major; "The Printer to the Reader," v-vi. It has often been pointed out that this was not actually the "first translation of a classic in this western world," that George Sandys had translated Ovid's Metamorphoses in Virginia in the i62o's, that Logan himself had previously translated (and Franklin had published) Cato's Moral Disticks. Still, one can argue that it was the first translation of a genuine classic by a genuine American. For the "Distichs of Cato" was hardly a "classic" and Sandys, who spent only four years in the New World, was scarcely an "American." 55 "Old Age," Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson [Centenary Edition] (Boston and New York, 1903-1904), 315-316. 434 FREDERICK B. TOLLES October dignified yet informal. Here is a fragment of Cicero's concluding "lofty strain" in Logan's English56: For while we are closed in these mortal Frames, our Bodies, we are bound down to a Law of Necessity, that obliges us with Labour and'Pains to attend to the Discharge of the several incumbent Duties it requires. But our Minds are of a heavenly Original, descended from the blissful Seats above, thrust down and immersed into these gross Habitations of the Earth, a Situation altogether unsuitable to a divine and eternal Nature. But the immortal Gods, I believe, thought fit to throw our immortal Minds into these human Bodies, that the Earth might be peopled with Inhabitants proper to contemplate and admire the Beauty and Order of the Heavens, and the whole Creation; that from this great Exemplar they might form their Conduct and regulate their Lives, with the like unerring Steadiness, as we see is unvariably pursued, not only in those celestial Motions, but thro* the whole Process of Nature. . . . For I have heard, that Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans . . . laid it down as their fixed and grand Principle, that our Minds are an Efflux or Portion of the Divine Universal Mind, that governs the Whole. On the other hand, Logan did not hesitate to fall into a proverbial or colloquial idiom when the spirit of the original seemed to demand it. For example, he rendered "pares . . . vetere proverbio cum paribus facillime congregantur" most aptly as "Birds of a Feather will flock together."57 In one of his footnotes, quoting a passage from Livy, he gives it in translation a delightfully colloquial flavor: Hannibal speaks, having just heard that Fabius has retaken Tarentum which he himself had only recently captured: "Well (says he) I see the Romans have also their oAnnibals."bS In another footnote he translated two lines from Horace (Odes, III, xxi) with a sly humor59: Narratur et prisci Catonis Saepe mero caluisse virtus Old Cato would, 'tis said, with Wine Make his reverend Face to shine. Logan, the born scholiast, is at his happiest and best in the footnotes. So extensive, so exuberantly voluminous are they that they

56 Cato Major, 149-150. Si Ibid., 18. 58 Ibid., 25 (note 17). 59 Ibid., 98-99 (note 71). 1955 JAMES LOGAN, QUAKER HUMANIST 435 nearly engulf the text in Franklin's edition. Taken together, they represent perhaps Logan's longest consecutive work of scholarship. Much of the superabundant learning in these swollen footnotes is devoted to identifying and determining the precise ages of the men Cicero mentions as notable examples of a green old age. Logan drew his information from a wide range of ancient writers and modern scholars, and if all this research seems little more than a harmless pedantic game, one can nevertheless think of less interesting and rewarding ways of occupying one's leisure. Not all the footnotes, however, are of this sort. Some are pleasantly discursive. A note on Milo of Croton, for instance, gratuitously recounts from Diodorus Siculus the story of a battle between Croton and Sybaris in which 100,000 Crotoniates defeated 300,000 Sybarites. Disarmingly Logan adds: "This was not necessary for illustrating Cicero; but my Design in relating it, is to note the vast Populousness of some Countries in former Ages." Having made this apology, he turns to the second book of Chronicles in the Bible and mentions Abijah's leading 400,000 soldiers against Jeroboam's army of 8oo,ooo.60 In another note he goes out of his way to tell how Lucius Aemilius Paulus put away his first wife "without assigning any other Reason for it, than Julius Caesar on the like Occasion did afterwards, by holding out his new Shoe, and asking if it was not handsome, but did they know where it pinch'dhim?"61 In some of his notes he expresses independent judgments of con- siderable shrewdness. For example, he has a long note on Democritus, in which he remarks that many spurious pieces have been attributed to him, including a fragment recently discovered in an Italian library and accepted as genuine by no less an authority than Professor Fabricius. "But in my Opinion," Logan observes, "it not only dis- covers itself by its Silliness," but by using the words "0 mighty Cm- peror" which suggest that it was probably written under the Roman Empire.62 He even dares to belittle the works of the great. Cato's T>e re rustica, he says, may be the oldest Latin book in prose, but it "does no great Honour to the Author."63

60 Ibid., 60-61 (note 46). 61 Ibid., 32 (note 24). 62 Ibid., 48-49 (note 38). 63 Ibid., 108 (note 78). 436 FREDERICK B. TOLLES October At least one contemporary found the notes highly instructive and edifying. A reader in Barbados, thanking Logan's son-in-law for a copy of the book, wrote: "When I read him, methinks I have James Logan with me and giving me the history of the several persons that Cato or Cicero mentions/'64 And seventy-five years later, a brilliant and scholarly Boston Brahmin, pronouncing Logan's translation the best before that of William Melmoth the Younger, praised the notes as "entertaining, and taken, not from modern compendiums, but from the original authors."65 For well over a century Cato zMajor has been neglected or, when noticed at all, treated as a footnote to the life of Franklin.66 Some clue to this neglect may be found in the book's curious publishing history. Franklin sent five hundred copies of the work to his friend William Strahan to be sold in England.67 Apparently the book met a demand, for it was reprinted by a London publisher six years later with a sketch of Cicero's life added, but without Franklin's preface. The translator was mysteriously identified as "Mr. Loggan."68 The next year (the year of the translator's death) an edition appeared in Glasgow as by "the Honourable Mr. Logan," otherwise unidenti- fied.69 Seven years later, this Glasgow edition was reprinted. At last the translator was identified more specifically, though still not quite

64 Joseph Gamble to John Smith, Sept. 24, 1744, Smith Manuscripts, II, 52, Library Com- pany of Philadelphia. 65 The critic was the Rev. Joseph Buckminster in The Monthly Anthology, V (1808), 342, 393. For Buckminster's authorship of this notice (which is unsigned), see M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Journal of Anthology Society. 66 I have discovered one brief, laudatory notice of the book as late as January, 1825, in Blackwood's Magazine. Most references to it in intellectual or literary histories of the United States merely record its publication, and have nothing to say of its contents, except for Franklin's preface. This is true, for instance, of Moses Coit Tyler's History of American Litera- ture 1607-1765, of Merle Curti's Growth of American Thought, and even—mea culpa—of my own contribution to the Literary History of the United States, 67 Franklin to Strahan, July 31, 1744, A. H. Smyth, ed., Writings of Franklin (New York, 1905-1907), II, 280. 68 Cato Major; or, a Treatise on Old Age by M. Tullius Cicero. With Explanatory Notes from the Roman History. By Mr. Loggan. 69 Cato Major; or, A Treatise on Old Age by M. Tullius Cicero. With Explanatory Notes from the Roman History. By the Honourable Mr. Logan. Philadelphia, Printed. Glasgow, Reprinted, by R. Urie, 1751. This appears to be based on both of the previous editions, for it includes the table of contents and the footnotes are correctly numbered, but Franklin's preface is present. 1955 JAMES LOGAN, QUAKER HUMANIST 437 accurately, as "the Honourable James Logan, Esq; President of the Council and Chief Justice of the Province of Philadelphia/'70 The same year, William Dunlap, who had married a cousin of Franklin's wife, brought out a second American edition.71 There was a break of twenty years and then, in the middle of the American Revolution, the book appeared once again. This time Franklin's preface had been skillfully cut so as to omit all reference to Logan as translator and annotator. The title page read: "With Explanatory Notes. By Benjamin Franklin, LL.D."! Obviously, this was a bookseller's dodge to capitalize on the name and fame of the man who was best known in England of all the American rebels, who indeed was just then negotiating an alliance between the rebellious colonies and Britain's archenemy, the King of France.72 This wilful misattribution was perpetuated thirty years later by William Duane, who included Logan's translation of the Cato aMajor in the fourth volume of his edition of Franklin's works. At some point after publication Duane either recognized his mistake or—what seems more likely—realized he could not get away with the fraud, and withdrew the Cato zJXCajor, substituting an equivalent number of pages of other material. But after making this concession to editorial honesty, he could not resist the temptation to turn a dishonest penny by gathering up the withdrawn sheets and issuing the translation separately—as Franklin's, He even compounded the fraud by including a preface which described the piece as exhibiting "strong marks of that character which distinguished [Franklin's] own subsequent life—that strict public virtue, that economy and frugality united with temperance,—that love of utility and wisdom, that thirst for knowledge and invincible integrity which is drawn with so many charms by Cicero."

70 Cato Major. . . . The Fourth Edition. Philadelphia, Printed. Glasgow, Reprinted by R. Urie, 1758. 71 Cato Major; or, A Treatise on Old Age. By M. Tullius Cicero. With Explanatory Notes from the Roman History. Philadelphia: Printed by William Dunlap, 1758. 72 The publishers were Fielding and Walker, Paternoster Row; their edition appeared in 1778 and appears to have been based on the original Franklin imprint. At least one English reader refused to be taken in. After paying tribute to Logan's translation, John Davis, the traveler whose eulogy of Logan has already been quoted, observed: "Whether Franklin was qualified to write annotations on Tully's noble treatise, will admit of some doubt. . . ." Travels, 42. 438 FREDERICK B. TOLLES October There can be little question that Duane knew he was perpetrating or perpetuating a cheat. His text, he said, was taken from the London edition of 1778 and "from the copy preserved in Dr. Franklin's library." Now the copy in Franklin's library was presumably the 1744 edition, which stated expressly that the translation was Logan's. To explain the pagination (the separate publication was paged from 251 to 357, as in the volume for which it had originally been set in type) Duane's preface simply stated that the work had been intended for insertion in Franklin's works, "but was subsequently omitted." No hint that it was omitted because it was not Franklin's! And the title page boldly carried the words: zJXCarcus Tullius Cicero's Cato dMajor . . . With explanatory !fi(ptes by benjamin Franklin^ -C-O©.73 How many readers were taken in by this double imposture it is impossible to know. Probably not so many as the number of those who, knowing the 1744 ^at0 zMajor as Franklin's printing masterpiece, have never bothered to read it and discover how good a performance it is. Benjamin Franklin needs no adventitious or fraudulent laurels. But the name of James Logan, builder of the best classical library in early America, probably the most knowledgeable student of the classics in the colonies, friend and correspondent of humanistic scholars in the Old World, first American translator of a major classic, needs to be rescued from oblivion or that worse fate of being a pendant to the glory of another. In any just assessment of our early cultural history his is clarum et venerabile nomen.

Swarthmore College FREDERICK B. TOLLES 73 A sharp-eyed reviewer in the Analectic Magazine for May, 1817 (IX, 365) noted the fraud, as did Paul Leicester Ford in his Franklin Bibliography (Brooklyn, N. Y., 1889), 27. Francis S. Philbrick in his "Notes on Early Editions and Editors of Franklin,'* Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, XCVII (Oct., 1953), 556-557, takes up the charge of dis- honesty against Duane, reviews the evidence carefully, and renders a Scotch verdict of "not proved." To me, however, the evidence, as presented above, seems to lead to only one verdict: guilty. Philbrick even makes the suggestion that the Cato Major may never actually have appeared in Duane's edition of Franklin. This charitable suggestion must now be ruled out. Though eight of the nine copies of Volume IV which I examined (or had others examine for me) were innocent of it, the ninth—in the Library of Congress—contained it. It was probably re- moved after a few advance copies, including reviewers' copies, had gone out.