Never was a community in such sore need of caricature and burlesque as when James Franklin set up in Boston, in 1721, the first "sensational newspaper" of America, the _Courant_, to which his brother Benjamin and the other rebels and come-outers of Boston contributed. The Mathers, as human beings and citizens of New England, were estimable and even admirable; but the interests of human nature demand the suppression of pontiffs. These Mathers, though naturally benevolent, and not wanting in natural modesty, had attained to such a degree of pontifical arrogance as to think _Boston_ in deadly peril because a knot of young fellows in a printing-office aimed satirical paragraphs at them. Increase Mather called upon the Government to "suppress such a cursed libel," lest "some awful judgment should come upon the land, and the wrath of God should rise, and there should be no remedy." It is for such men that burlesque was made, and the Franklins supplied it in abundance. The _Courant_ ridiculed them even when they were gloriously in the right. They were enlightened enough and brave enough to recommend inoculation, then just brought from Turkey by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The young doctors who wrote for the paper assailed the new system, apparently for no other reason than because Increase and Cotton Mather were its chief defenders. When Benjamin, at the age of sixteen, began to contribute to his brother's paper, he aimed at higher game even than the town pontiffs. He dared to lampoon Harvard College itself, the temple of learning where the clergy were formed, whose precincts he had hoped to tread, his father having dedicated this tenth son to the Church. He may have had his own father in mind when he wrote, in one of his early numbers, that every "peasant" who had the means proposed to send one of his children to this famous place; and as most of them consulted their purses rather than their children's capacities, the greater number of those who went thither were little better than blockheads and dunces. When he came to speak of the theological department of the college, he drew a pen caricature, having then no skill with the pencil: "The business of those who were employed in the temple of theology being laborious and painful, I wondered exceedingly to see so many go toward it; but while I was pondering this matter in my mind, I spied _Pecunia_ behind a curtain, beckoning to them with her hand." He draws another when he says that the only remarkable thing he saw in this temple was one Plagius hard at work copying an eloquent passage from Tillotson's works to embellish his own.