The couplet was accompanied by a still more venomous sting in prose: "James Ralph, a name inserted after the first editions, not known till he writ a swearing-piece called _Sawney_, very abusive of Dr. Swift, Mr. Gay, and myself. These lines allude to a thing of his entitled _Night_, a poem. This low writer attended his own works with panegyrics in the Journals, and once in particular praised himself highly above Mr. Addison, in wretched remarks upon that author's account of English poets, printed in a London Journal, September, 1728. He was wholly illiterate and knew no language, not even French. Being advised to read the rules of dramatic poetry before he began a play, he smiled and replied 'Shakspeare writ without rules.' He ended at last in the common sink of all such writers, a political newspaper, to which he was recommended by his friend Arnal, and received a small pittance for pay; and being detected in writing on both sides on one and the same day, he publicly justified the morality of his conduct." Another couplet of the _Dunciad_ is this: "And see! the very Gazetteers give o'er, Ev'n Ralph repents, and Henley writes no more." [33] "The ship Ohio still aground," is the manner in which Franklin communicated on one occasion to Galloway the slow progress that the application for the Ohio grant was making. CHAPTER VI Franklin's British Friends In Great Britain, Franklin had almost as many friends as in America. During his missions to England, he resided at No. 7 Craven Street, London, the home of Mrs. Margaret Stevenson, a widow, and the mother of "Polly," whose filial relations to him constituted an idyll in his life. Into all the interests and feelings of this home, he entered almost as fully and sympathetically as he did into those of his own home in Philadelphia; as is charmingly attested by his Craven Street _Gazette_. Mrs. Stevenson looked after his clothing, attended to him when he was sick, and made the purchases from time to time that the commissions of Deborah and Jane Mecom called for. In one of his letters to Temple, written after his return from his second mission to England, Franklin mentions a long letter that he had received from her in the form of "a kind of Journal for a Month after our Departure, written on different Days, & of different Dates, acquainting me who has call'd, and what is done, with all the small News. In four or five Places, she sends her Love to her dear Boy, hopes he was not very sick at Sea, &c., &c." This journal doubtless set forth in a matter-of-fact way the daily life of the Craven Street household, which Franklin idealized with such captivating vivacity in the humorous pages of the Craven Street _Gazette_. At the Craven Street house, he and his son lived in great comfort, occupying four rooms, and waited upon by his man-servant, and Billy's negro attendant; and, when he moved about the streets of London, it was in a modest chariot of his own. Franklin's letters to Deborah