After Franklin's father warned him that his arguments were not well-ordered and trenchantly expressed, he desperately sought to acquire a convincing prose style. In 1717 James, Franklin's elder brother, returned from serving a printer's apprenticeship in London. James had known and been attracted to Augustan England, the England of the _Tatler_, _Spectator_, and _Guardian_. Familiar is Franklin's narrative of how he patterned his fledgling style on the pages of the _Spectator_ papers, and learned to satisfy his father--and himself. Like the neoclassicists, Franklin learned to write by imitation, by respectfully subordinating himself to those he recognized as masters, and not, like the romanticists, by expressing his own ego in revolt against convention and conformity to traditional standards. The group who supplied copy for James's _New England Courant_, we are told, were trying to write like the _Spectator_. "The very look of an ordinary first page of the _Courant_ is like that of the _Spectator_ page."[i-125] In the _Dogood Papers_ (1722) and the _Busy-Body_ series (1728) Franklin's writings show a literal indebtedness to the style and even substance of the _Spectator_.[i-126] If, after the _Busy-Body_ essays, Franklin's writings bear little resemblance to the elegance and glow of the _Spectator_, he did learn from it a long-remembered lesson in orderliness. From the _Spectator_ he may have learned to temper wit with morality and morality with wit; he may have learned the neoclassic objection to the "unhappy Force of an Imagination, unguided by the Check of Reason and Judgment";[i-127] he may have acquired his distrust of foreign phrases when English ones were as good, or better, insisting on the use of native English undefiled. It is interesting but perhaps futile to conjecture to what degree Franklin at this time, on reading _Spectator_ No. 160, "On Geniuses" (warning against a servile imitation of ancient authors, a warning which anticipates the cult of original geniuses of later decades), would have been predisposed against ancient literature and languages. If the _Spectator_ was partially responsible for his pleasantries at the expense of Greek in _Dogood Paper_ No. IV, his attitude toward the ancients is more ostensibly the result of his later preoccupation with the sciences,[i-128] and of contact with representatives of the deistic time-spirit whose faith in progress led them to underrate the past.