On Mussi's In virgam Franklinianam

Abstract

In his absorbing study, Benjamin Franklin and Italy (Philadelphia, I958), Antonio Pace calls attention to the fine Latin ode In virgam Franklinianamn by Antonio Mussi. Professor of philosophy at Milan and later director of the Ambrosian Library, Mussi wrote the poem on the occasion of the installation of lightning rods on the Royal Brera Gymnasium in i784. Pace remarks that the only text of the poem he has been able to find is that quoted in William Temple Franklin's Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin (London, i8i8), II, 285, and he suspects that William Temple Franklin transcribed it from a copy among the papers of his grandfather. I have found, however, a printed text of i790, which suggests that William Temple Franklin used either it or (more likely) some printed archetype of it rather than a manuscript text of the poem; furthermore, this i790 text clears up several errors that mar the poem in the Memoirs. The newly located text appears in The American Museum, VII (I79o), P.[I], a magazine edited and published by Matthew Carey at Philadelphia for the purpose of reprinting articles and poems from various books, pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines. (See Lyon N. Richardson, A History of Early American Magazines, I74I-I789 (New York, I93I), 3i6-3i7, 330, 37I-372.) The Museum text is accompanied by a Latin footnote by Mussi and by the English footnote of some editor. Both these footnotes appear almost verbatim below the text in the Memoirs. But while the Museum text reveals that the metrically incorrect religionibus of stanza one of the Memoirs text should be relligionibus, and that the meaningless peti in stanza eleven of the Memoirs text should be petit, certain aspects of the Museum text suggest that William Temple Franklin copied not it but an archetype of it: i) the syllabically curtailed, metrically impossible munit of stanza eight of the Museum text appears properly as munjit in the Memoirs text (and we have adopted that in the Museum text below); 2) the less common spelling coeca in stanza eleven of the Museum text appears in the familiar form caeca in the Memoirs text; 3) whereas footnote one