Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters

[61] like their paper, type, and even ink, were found in London. The New England Courant, established in Boston in 1721 by James Franklin, is full of imitations of the Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian. What is more, the Courant boasted of its office collection of books, including Shakespeare, Milton, the Spectator, and Swift's Tale of a Tub,¹ This was in 1722. If we remember that no allusion to Shakespeare has been discovered in the colonial literature of the seventeenth century, and scarcely an allusion to the Puritan poet Milton, and that the Harvard College Library in 1723 had nothing of Addison, Steele, Bolingbroke, Dryden, Pope, and Swift, and had only recently obtained copies of Milton and Shakespeare, we can appreciate the value of James Franklin's apprenticeship in London. Perhaps we can even forgive him for that attack upon the Mathers which threw the conduct of the Courant, for a brief period, into the hands of his brother Benjamin, whose turn at a London apprenticeship was soon to come.

If we follow this younger brother to Philadelphia and to Bradford's American Mercury or