Episode Description
In this essay, in which Teen Ben Franklin trolls his brother James, Silence Dogood features a real poem (An Elegy upon the much Lamented Death of Mrs. Mehitable Kitel) and dryly praises it as "the most Extraordinary Piece that ever was written in New-England."
Ben Franklin then famously includes a satirical recipe for writing a terrible colonial elegy. He instructs readers to take a person's virtues, mix in a handful of melancholy words (like dreadful or cruel cold death), and "put them into the empty Scull of some young Harvard student to finish the job. It's another example of young Ben's satiric wit.
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