Born at Boston, Mass., Jan. 17, 1706: Died at Philadelphia, April 17, 1790. A celebrated American philosopher, statesman, diplomatist, and author. He learned the printer’s trade in the office of his elder brother James, and in 1729 established himself at Philadelphia as editor and proprietor of the “Pennsylvania Gazette.” He founded the Philadelphia library in 1731; began the publication of “Poor Richard’s Almanac” in 1732; was appointed clerk of the Pennsylvania assembly in 1736; became postmaster of Philadelphia in 1737; founded the American Philosophical Society and the University of Pennsylvania in 1743 and in 1752 demonstrated by experiments made with a kite during a thunderstorm that lightning is a discharge of electricity, a discovery for which he was awarded the Copley medal by the Royal Society in 1753. He was deputy postmaster-general for the British colonies in America 1753–74. In 1754, at a convention of the New England colonies with New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, held at Albany, he proposed a plan, known as the “Albany Plan,” which contemplated the formation of a self-sustaining government for all the colonies, and which, although adopted by the convention, failed of support in the colonies. He acted as colonial agent for Pennsylvania in England 1757–62 and 1764–75; was elected to the second Continental Congress in 1775; and in 1776 was a member of the committee of five chosen by Congress to draw up a declaration of independence. He arrived at Paris, Dec. 21, 1776, as ambassador to the court of France; and in conjunction with Arthur Lee and Silas Deane concluded a treaty with France, Feb. 6, 1778, by which France recognized the independence of America. In 1782, on the advent of Lord Rockingham’s ministry to power, he began a correspondence with Lord Shelburne, secretary of state for home and colonies, which led to negotiations for peace; and in conjunction with Jay and Adams concluded with England the treaty of Paris, Sept. 3, 1783. He returned to America in 1785; was president of Pennsylvania 1785–88; and was a delegate to the constitutional convention in 1787. He left an autobiography, which was edited by John Bigelow in 1868. His works have been edited by Jared Sparks (10 vols., 1836–40) and John Bigelow (10 vols., 1887–1888).

Personal

	The Body
	Of
	Benjamin Franklin,
	Printer,
	(Like the cover of an old book,
	Its contents torn out,
	And stript of its lettering and gilding),
	Lies here, food for worms.
	Yet the work itself shall not be lost,
	For it will, as he believed, appear once more,
	In a new
	And more beautiful edition,
	Corrected and amended
	By
	The Author.

  There was a circumstance that I shall never forget, which passed in one of our conversations. Dr. Wight and I had seen Dr. Franklin at Edinburgh, as I have formerly related; we mentioned this philosopher to Mr. Allen with the respect we thought due, and he answered, “Yes, all you have said of him is true, and I could add more in his praise; but though I have now got the better of him, he has cost me more trouble since he came to reside in our State than all mankind besides; and I can assure you that he is a man so turbulent, and such a plotter, as to be able to embroil the three kingdoms, if he ever has an opportunity.” Franklin was after this for several weeks in Edinburgh, with David Hume, but I did not see him, having been from home on some jaunt. In 1769 or ’70 I met him at an invited dinner in London, at John Stuart’s, the Provost’s son, I think it was, where he was silent and inconversible, but this was after he has been refused the office of Postmaster-General of America, and had got a severe dressing from Wedderburn, then Solicitor or Attorney-General.

  An Epitaph &c. | To the much esteem’d Memory of | B … F … Esq., LL.D. | … | Possessed of many lucrative | Offices | Procured to him by the Interest of Men | Whom he infamously treated | And receiving enormous sums | from the Province | For Services | He never performed | After betraying it to Party and Contention | He lived, as to the Appearance of Wealth | In moderate circumstances; | His principal Estate, seeming to consist | In his Hand Maid Barbara | A most valuable Slave | The Foster Mother | of his last offspring | Who did his dirty Work | And in two Angelic Females | Whom Barbara also served | As Kitchen Wench and Gold Finder | But alas the Loss! | Providence for wise tho’ secret ends | Lately deprived him of his Mother | of Excellency | His Fortune was not however impaired | For he piously withheld from her | Manes | The pitiful stipend of Ten pounds per Annum | On which he had cruelly suffered her | To starve | Then stole her to the Grave in Silence | Without a Pall, the covering due to her dignity | Without a tomb or even | A Monumental Inscription.

  There is a general union among the colonies, which no artifices of a ministry will be able to break. Dr. Franklin is a very popular character in every part of America. He will be received, and carried in triumph to his house, when he arrives amongst us. It is to be hoped he will not consent to hold any more offices under government. No step but this can prevent his being handed down to posterity among the first and greatest characters in the world.

  A man who makes a figure in the learned world.

  After dinner we went to the Academy of Sciences, and heard M. d’Alembert, as perpetual secretary, pronounce eulogies on several of their members, lately deceased. Voltaire and Franklin were both present, and there presently arose a general cry that M. Voltaire and M. Franklin should be introduced to each other. This was done, and they bowed and spoke to each other. This was no satisfaction; there must be something more. Neither of our philosophers seemed to divine what was wished or expected; they, however, took each other by the hand. But this was not enough; the clamor continued, until the explanations came out. “Il faut s’ embrasser, à la Françoise.” The two aged actors upon this great theatre of philosophy and frivolity then embraced each other, by hugging one another in their arms, and kissing each other’s cheeks, and then the tumult subsided. And the cry immediately spread through the whole kingdom, and, I suppose, over all Europe—“Qu’ il était charmant de voir embrasser Solon et Sophocle!”

  Mr. Fragonard, the king’s painter at Paris, has lately displayed the utmost efforts of his genius in an elegant picture dedicated to the genius of Franklin. Mr. Franklin is represented in it opposing with one hand the ægis of Minerva to the thunderbolt, which he first knew how to fix by his conductors, and with the other commanding the god of war to fight against avarice and tyranny whilst America, nobly reclining upon him, and holding in her hand the fasces, a true emblem of the union of the American States, looks down with tranquility on her defeated enemies. The painter, in this picture, most beautifully expressed the idea of the Latin verse, which has been so justly applied to Mr. Franklin:

Eripuit cœlo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis.

(He snatched the thunderbolt from heaven and the scepter from the hands of tyrants).

  In a gallery of paintings in the Louvre, I was much gratified in perceiving the portrait of Franklin, near those of the king and queen, placed there as a mark of distinguished respect, and, as was understood, in conformity with royal directions. Few foreigners have been presented to the court of St. Cloud who have acquired so much popularity as Dr. Franklin. I have seen the populace attend his carriage, in the manner they followed the king’s. His venerable figure, the ease of his manners, formed in an intercourse of fifty years with the world, his benevolent countenance, and his fame as a philosopher, all tended to excite love, and to command influence and respect. He had attained, by the exercise of these qualities, a powerful interest in the feelings of the beautiful queen of France. She held at that time a powerful political influence. The exercise of that influence, adroitly directed by Franklin, tended to produce the acknowledgment of our independence, and the subsequent efficient measures pursued by France in its support.

	What diff’rence then can virtue claim
	From vice, if it oblivious lie?
	While I can sing your spotless name,
	Your worthy deeds shall never die.
	Nor shall oblivion’s livid power
	Your patriotic toils conceal:
	Alike in good, or adverse hour,
	A patron of the common-weal.
	Forever faithful and sincere,
	Your hands from gilded baits are free:
	The public villain stands in fear
	You should perpetual counsel be.
	The knave possest of shining pelf,
	Can never sway your honest choice:
	For justice, emblem of yourself,
	Exalts above the rabble’s voice.

  Of all the celebrated persons whom in my life I have chanced to see, Dr. Franklin, both from his appearance and his conversation, seemed to me the most remarkable. His venerable patriarchal appearance, the simplicity of his manner and language, and the novelty of his observations, at least the novelty of them at that time to me, impressed me with an opinion of him as of one of the most extraordinary men that ever existed.

  A new town in the state of Massachusetts having done me the honor of naming itself after me, and proposing to build a steeple to their meeting-house, if I would give them a bell, I have advised the sparing themselves the expense of a steeple for the present, and that they would accept of books instead of a bell, sense being preferable to sound. These are therefore intended as a commencement of a little parochial library for the use of a society of intelligent, respectable farmers, such as our country people generally consists of.

  DEAR SIR: Amid the public gratulation on your safe return to America, after a long absence, and the many eminent services you had rendered it—for which as a benefited person I feel the obligation—permit an individual to join the public voice in expressing his sense of them; and to assure you, that as no one entertains more respect for your character, so none can salute you with more sincerity or with greater pleasure than I do on this occasion. I am—dear sir, Your most obt. and most Hble. Servt.

  Dr. Franklin lives in Market street. His house stands up a court, at some distance from the street. We found him in his garden, sitting upon a grass-plot, under a very large mulberry tree, with several other gentlemen and two or three ladies. When Mr. Gerry introduced me, he rose from his chair, took me by the hand, expressed his joy at seeing me, welcomed me to the city, and begged me to seat myself close to him. His voice was low, but his countenance open, frank, and pleasing… He seemed exceedingly fond, through the course of the visit, of dwelling on philosophical subjects and particularly that of Natural History; while the other gentlemen were swallowed up with politics. This was a favorable circumstance for me; for almost the whole of his conversation was addressed to me, and I was highly delighted with the extensive knowledge he appeared to have of every subject, the brightness of his memory, and clearness and vivacity of all his mental faculties, notwithstanding his age. His manners are perfectly easy, and everything about him seems to diffuse an unrestrained freedom and happiness. He has an incessant vein of humor, accompanied with an uncommon vivacity, which seems as natural and involuntary as his breathing.

	Be it remembered
	In honor of the Philadelphia Youth,
	(then chiefly artificers)
	that in MDCCXXXI.,
	they cheerfully,
	at the instances of Benjamin Franklin,
	one of their number,
	instituted the Philadelphia Library,
	which, though small at first,
	is become highly valuable and extensively useful
	and which the walls of this edifice
	are now destined to contain and preserve,
	the first stone of whose foundation
	was here placed,
	the thirty-first day of August, 1789.

  About sixteen days before his death he was seized with a feverish indisposition, without any particular symptoms attending it, till the third or fourth day, when he complained of a pain in the left breast, which increased till it became extremely acute, attended with a cough and laborious breathing. During this state when the severity of his pains drew forth a groan of complaint, he would observe—that he was afraid he did not bear them as he ought—acknowledged his grateful sense of the many blessings he had received from that Supreme Being, who had raised him from small and low beginnings to such high rank and consideration among men—and made no doubt but his present afflictions were kindly intended to wean him from a world, in which he was no longer fit to act the part assigned him. In this frame of body and mind he continued till five days before his death, when his pain and difficulty of breathing entirely left him, and his family were flattering themselves with the hopes of his recovery, when an imposthumation [abscess], which had formed itself in his lungs suddenly burst, and discharged a great quantity of matter, which he continued to throw up while he had sufficient strength to do it; but, as that failed, the organs of respiration became gradually oppressed—a calm lethargic state succeeded—and, on the 17th of April, 1790, about eleven o’clock at night, he quietly expired, closing a long and useful life of eighty-four years and three months.

  Mr. Speaker: As we have been informed, not only through the channel of the newspapers, but by a more direct communication, of the decease of an illustrious character, whose native genius has rendered distinguished services to the cause of science and of mankind in general; and whose patriotic exertions have contributed in a high degree to the independence and prosperity of this country in particular; the occasion seems to call upon us to pay some tribute to his memory expressive of the tender veneration his country feels for such distinguished merit. I therefore move the following resolution: “The House being informed of the decease of Benjamin Franklin, a citizen whose native genius was not more an ornament to human nature than his various exertions of it have been precious to science, to freedom, and to his country, do resolve, as a mark of the veneration due to his memory, that the members wear the customary badge of mourning for one month.”

  Franklin is dead! The genius that freed America and poured a flood of light over Europe has returned to the bosom of the Divinity. The sage whom two worlds claim as their own, the man for whom the history of science and the history of empires contend with each other, held, without doubt, a high rank in the human race. Too long have political cabinets taken formal note of the death of those who were great only in their funeral panegyrics. Too long has the etiquette of courts prescribed hypocritical mourning. Nations should wear mourning only for their benefactors. The representatives of nations should recommend to their homage none but the heroes of humanity. The Congress has ordained, throughout the United States, a mourning of one month for the death of Franklin, and at this moment America is paying this tribute of veneration and gratitude to one of the fathers of her Constitution. Would it not become us, gentlemen, to join in this religious act, to bear a part in this homage, rendered, in the face of the world, both to the rights of man and to the philosopher who has most contributed to extend their sway over the whole earth? Antiquity would have raised altars to this mighty genius, who, to the advantage of mankind, compassing in his mind the heavens and earth, was able to restrain alike thunderbolts and tyrants. Europe, enlightened and free, owes at least a token of remembrance and regret to one of the greatest men who has ever been engaged in the service of philosophy and liberty. I propose that it be decreed that the National Assembly, during three days shall wear mourning for Benjamin Franklin.

  As soon as his country was so well established that she had no need of seeking for partisans, his life became more retired and peaceable. In his retreat at Passy, there formed around him a circle, not large, of a few friends; and their company, with simple pursuits, occupied the close of a noble life. The course of it was broken by a painful illness, however, and from this moment his mind turned toward his own country. He left France, giving her, as the reward of her service, a great example, and lessons which could not long remain without profit. He sailed from an English port, to which he was accompanied by M. Le Veillard, who, while he lived at Passy, had lavished all the cares of filial tenderness upon him, and wished to postpone to the last moment what was to be an eternal separation. Franklin only stopped on the shores of England. He was so generous that he spared his humiliated enemies the spectacle of his glory. The French were his friends; the English were relatives,—whose faults one is glad to forget,—with regard to whom we still respect the bonds of nature, though they have broken them by their injustice.

  On Wednesday, King the American minister, Eliot, Montagu, and Henry Thornton dined with me, Rational day… Franklin seems, from King, not to be in good estimation in America. Thought a dishonest, tricking, hypocritical character; a free-thinker really, yet pretending to believe in the authority of Scripture.

  This self-taught American is the most rational, perhaps, of all philosophers. He never loses sight of common sense in any of his speculations…. No individual, perhaps, ever possessed a juster understanding, or was so seldom obstructed in the use of it by indolence, enthusiasm, or authority. Dr. Franklin received no regular education; and he spent the greater part of his life in a society where there was no relish and no encouragement for literature. On an ordinary mind, these circumstances would have produced their usual effects, of repressing all sorts of intellectual ambition or activity, and perpetuating a generation of incurious mechanics; but to an understanding like Franklin’s, we cannot help considering them as peculiarly propitious, and imagine that we can trace back to them distinctly almost all the peculiarities of his intellectual character.

  His reputation was more universal than that of Leibnitz or Newton, Frederick or Voltaire, and his character more beloved and esteemed than any or all of them…. His name was familiar to government and people, to kings and courtiers, nobility, clergy and philosophers, as well as plebeians, to such a degree that there was scarcely a peasant or a citizen, a valet de chambre: a coachman or footman, a lady’s chambermaid or a scullion in the kitchen who was not familiar with it, and who did not consider him as a friend to human kind…. Nothing, perhaps, that ever occurred upon the earth was so well calculated to give any man an extensive and universal celebrity as the discovery of the efficacy of iron points and the invention of lightning-rods. The idea was one of the most sublime that ever entered a human imagination, that a mortal should disarm the clouds of heaven, and almost “snatch from his hand the sceptre and the rod.” The ancients would have enrolled him with Bacchus and Ceres, Hercules and Minerva. His Paratonnères erected their heads in all parts of the world, on temples and palaces no less than on cottages of peasants and the habitations of ordinary citizens. These visible objects reminded all men of the name and character of their inventor; and, in the course of time, have not only tranquilized the minds; and dissipated the fears of the tender sex and their timorous children, but have almost annihilated that panic terror and superstitious horror which was once almost universal in violent storms of thunder and lightning.

  An independence of thought, a constant and direct reference to utility, a consequent abstinence from whatever is merely curious and ornamental, or even remotely useful, a talent for ingeniously betraying vice and prejudice into an admission of reason, and for exhibiting their sophisms in that state of undisguised absurdity in which they are ludicrous, and with a singular power of striking illustration from homely objects, would justify us in calling Franklin The American Socrates.

  Benjamin Franklyn, who, by bringing a spark from heaven, fulfilled the prophecies he pretended to disbelieve; Franklyn, who wrote a profane addition to the Book of Genesis, who hissed on the colonies against their parent country, who taught men to despise their Sovereign and insult their Redeemer; who did all the mischief in his power while living, and at last died, I think, in America; was beside all the rest, a plagiarist, as it appears; and the curious epitaph made on himself, and as we long believed, by himself, was, I am informed, borrowed without acknowledgment, from one, upon Jacob Tonson, to whom it was more appropriate, comparing himself to an old book, eaten by worms; which on some future day, however, should be new edited, after undergoing revisal and correction by the Author.

  As to the charge of subservience to France,… two years of my own service with him at Paris, daily visits, and the most friendly and confidential conversations, convinced me it had not a shadow of foundation. He possessed the confidence of that government in the highest degree, insomuch that it may truly be said, that they were more under his influence than he under theirs. The fact is, that his temper was so amiable and conciliatory, his conduct so rational, never urging impossibilities, or even things unreasonably inconvenient to them, in short so moderate and attentive to their difficulties as well as our own, that what his enemies called subserviency I saw was only that reasonable disposition which, sensible that advantages are not all to be on one side, yielding what is just and liberal, is the more certain of obtaining liberality and justice. Mutual confidence produces of course mutual influence, and this was all which subsisted between Dr. Franklin and the government of France.

  Franklin enjoyed, during the greater part of his life, a healthy constitution, and excelled in exercises of strength and activity. In stature he was above the middle size; manly, athletic and well proportioned. His countenance, as it is represented in his portrait, is distinguished by an air of serenity and satisfaction, the natural consequence of a vigorous temperament, of strength of mind, and conscious integrity. It is also marked, in visible characters, by deep thought and inflexible resolution. Very rarely shall we see a combination of features, of more agreeable harmony; an aspect in which the human passions are more happily blended or more favourably modified, to command authority, to conciliate esteem, or to excite love and veneration. His colloquial accomplishments are mentioned by those who knew him, in terms of the highest praise.

  Our Franklin happily passes his time, in pleasing sobriety, with the illustrious sages and philosophers of all nations and ages. Though uniformly cheerful, he seldom or never laughs; and, with all the engaging simplicity of a child, he pours forth the matured and comprehensive wisdom of experience. Uniting the essence of wit, quickness of thought and facility of combination, with that brevity which is its appropriate garb, he charms without effort and teaches without appearing the master. It is delightful to see him in simple dress and simple language, like one of the primitive instructors of mankind, condensing some fine moral in the compass of a single sentence, or illustrating some glorious precept by a happy allegory that embodies, and gives life and being to the truth. The weight of wisdom and benignity united with good temper and unaffected manners, was never more strikingly exemplified than in the influence of this immortal Printer upon the country to which he was a benefactor, and the age to which he was an ornament.

  Dr. Franklin appeared at court in the costume of an American cultivator; his hair plainly brushed, without powder. His round hat and plain coat of brown cloth contrasted strongly with the powdered coiffures and the bespangled and embroidered coats of the perfumed courtiers of Versailles. His simple and novel, yet dignified appearance charmed the ladies of the court, and many were the fêtes given him, not only for his fame as a philosopher, but in acknowledgment of his patriotic virtues, which led him to enroll himself among the noble supporters of the cause of liberty. I assisted at one of these entertainments, where the most beautiful from among three hundred ladies was designated to place a crown of laurel on the gray head, and to salute with a kiss each cheek of the American philosopher.

  His qualities were those of a sterling practical Englishman; he directed his whole attention to the real and substantial objects of life, and therefore at a later period in France he laughed at the sentimentality, ideality and enthusiasm of the French in favour of the freedom which he announced, and even at the manner in which he himself was idolized; but he was prudently silent, and availed himself of the Parisian mode for the promotion of his objects. He had now been for thirty years renowned in America as the founder of a printing establishment, the originator of widely circulated newspapers and journals, as a popular writer and moralist; and in Europe for fifteen years as a natural philosopher, an acute observer and discoverer of some of the grand phenomena of the physical world. He had become strictly moral as soon as he renounced the sins of his youth, and was no longer straitened or weighted down by the pressure of poverty; he however knew the ways of men too well to feel himself always bound to walk on the narrow path, or to renounce the course of crooked policy when the attainment of an important object invited him to pursue it, provided he was not required to commit any flagrant violations of propriety.

  The incorruptible integrity, sagacious intellect, and philosophic spirit of Franklin.

  No man in Paris, was more à la mode, more sought after than was Dr. Franklin. The crowd used to run after him in the walks and in the public resorts; hats, canes, snuff-boxes, everything was à la Franklin. Men and women considered it a piece of good fortune to be invited to a dinner at which this celebrated man was to be present.

	Sage Franklin next arose in cheerful mien,
	And smil’d, unruffled, o’er the solemn scene;
	High on his locks of age, a wreath was brac’d,
	Palm of all arts that e’er a mortal grac’d;
	Beneath him lay the sceptre kings had borne,
	And crowns and laurels from their temples torn.

  One of the most remarkable men certainly, of our times, as a politician, or of any age, as a philosopher, was Franklin; who also stands alone in combining together these two characters, the greatest that man can sustain, and in this, that having borne the first part in enlarging science, by one of the greatest discoveries ever made, he bore the second part in founding one of the greatest empires in the world…. In domestic life he was faultless, and in the intercourse of society, delightful. There was a constant good humour and a playful wit, easy and of high relish, without any ambition to shine, the natural fruit of his lively fancy, his solid, natural good sense, and his cheerful temper, that gave his conversation an unspeakable charm, and alike suited every circle, from the humblest to the most elevated. With all his strong opinions, so often solemnly declared, so imperishably recorded in his deeds, he retained a tolerance for those who differed with him, which could not be surpassed in men whose principles hang so loosely about them as to be taken up for a convenient cloak, and laid down when found to impede their progress. In his family he was everything that worth, warm affections, and sound prudence could contribute, to make a man both useful and amiable, respected and beloved. In religion, he would by many be reckoned a latitudinarian; yet it is certain that his mind was imbued with a deep sense of the Divine perfections, a constant impression of our accountable nature, and a lively hope of future enjoyment.

  With placid tranquility, Benjamin Franklin looked quietly and deeply into the secrets of nature. His clear understanding was never perverted by passion, or corrupted by the pride of theory. The son of a rigid Calvanist, the grandson of a tolerant Quaker, he had from boyhood been familiar not only with theological subtilities, but with a catholic respect for freedom of mind. Skeptical of tradition as the basis of faith, he respected reason, rather than authority; and, after a momentary lapse into fatalism, escaping from the mazes of fixed decrees and free will, he gained, with increasing years, an increasing trust in the overruling providence of God. Adhering to none “of all the religions” in the colonies, he yet devoutly, though without form, adhered to religion. But though famous as disputant, and having a natural aptitude for metaphysics, he obeyed the tendency of his age, and sought by observation to win an insight into the mysteries of being…. Never professing enthusiasm, never making a parade of sentiment, his practical wisdom was sometimes mistaken for the offspring of selfish prudence; yet his hope was steadfast, like that hope which rests on the Rock of Ages, and his conduct was as unerring as though the light that led him was a light from heaven. He ever anticipated action by theories of self-sacrificing virtue; and yet, in the moments of intense activity, he, from the highest abodes of ideal truth, brought down and applied to the affairs of life the sublimest principles of goodness, as noiselessly and unostentatiously as became the man who, with a kite and hempen string, drew the lightning from the skies.

  Franklin was the greatest diplomatist of the eighteenth century. He never spoke a word too soon; he never spoke a word too late; he never spoke a word too much; he never failed to speak the right word at the right season.

  The historic image of Benjamin Franklin, does not so vividly impress the mind as the grander, more colossal figures which, instinct with the glory of brilliant genius, star-stud the vista of the dim past—but its paler, less dazzling light, is—we may be permitted to repeat—a more hopeful and cheering one to the masses of mankind, for it shines upon a path to eminence which it requires no seraph’s wing,—no transcendant mental power—to oversweep or climb,—nothing but the qualities, prudently but courageously exercised, which he himself possessed,—a clear intellect,—firm purpose,—self-denial,—energetic labour,—and perhaps the moral of his life is all the more pertinent and instructive, inasmuch that he stumbled heavily upon the threshold of his career, and recovered himself unaided save by God and his own brave honesty of will.

  To-morrow we are to inaugurate Greenough’s Franklin with a tremendous procession—which I look at solely from a Mabelian point of view. Did I say solely? Well, let it stand. But I may just mention that the American Academy comes in before the governor, and Charles perhaps can tell you who some of the fellows are. It is thought that they will find carriages provided for them. That under these circumstances I should find composure to write to you is a curious biological (I believe that’s the word now) fact. There are to be two addresses and an oration. Only think how interesting! And we shall find out that Franklin was born in Boston, and invented being struck with lightning and printing and the Franklin medal, and that he had to move to Philadelphia because great men were so plenty in Boston that he had no chance, and that he revenged himself on his native town by saddling it with the Franklin stove, and that he discovered the almanac, and that a penny saved is a penny lost, or something of the kind. So we put him up a statue. I mean to invent something—in order to encourage sculptors.

  Go forth then, Benjamin Franklin, printer, to thy great calling; master, not of arts, but of the art of arts; graduate, not of academic halls, but of the three great faculties of temperance, industry, and generous ambition. There is a conflict before thee long and sharp, but the press has taught thy hands to war and thy fingers to fight; the victory is certain, the reward is glorious. Seas of trouble shall stretch before thee, but they shall roll up their crystal walls on thy right hand and on thy left, and thou shall pass through on dry ground. Events of unexampled magnitude for thee and thy country attend thy career; great wars are to be fought; oppressive rulers set at defiance; arduous negotiations conducted; alliances contracted abroad, confederacies entered into at home, constitutions framed, and governments administered;—and in all these vast concerns thou, even thou, Benjamin Franklin, printer, shalt bear a responsible and even a leading part, with the sages, the patriots, and the monarchs of Europe, with the most honoured and trusted of thy own country, with Adams, with Jefferson, with Jay, with Laurens, and above all, with Washington. Boston now sends thee forth a penniless fugitive; Philadelphia receives thee a homeless adventurer; but ere thou shalt taste of death, America, Europe, shall be too narrow for thy fame; and in times to come, the friendly strife of the city of thy birth and the city of thy adoption shall be which best, which most, shall do honor to thy memory.

  Well, Sir, this part of the town, I think, should have an interest for people from your side of the water, for it has associations connected with a certain countryman of yours named Benjamin Franklin. When he was toiling as a journeyman printer in the metropolis, more than a century ago, he was accustomed to stroll upon the Sunday afternoon along the banks of Father Thames, and this end of this Cheyne Row was usually his goal. One day, as he walked discoursing with a friend, he declared himself able to swim from here to London Bridge, distant about five miles. His friend offered a wager that it was impossible; and he, upon the instant stripping, plunged boldly in, and started for his mark, while his friend, bearing the clothes, strode down the bank; and a great multitude of spectators, growing ever greater as he proceeded, followed to see the feat. He, with brave stroke and lusty sinew buffeting the tide, gained the bridge and the wager. Whereupon, amidst great acclamations, the people suggested that he should start a swimming school. But God had other work for him to do: for in later years he was to teach the people of your continent how, by Frugality and Labor, and Patience and Courage, any man might buffet the waves of Fortune, and swim straight on to prosperity and success. And that was the swimming-school which he was to establish.

  Dr. Sprague, of Albany, who has collected a great number of autographs, made application, some time since, to a certain gentleman for that of Dr. Franklin. “Oh, you have one already,” said the person referred to. “No matter,” replied the determined collector. “I want it for exchange. One Benny Franklin in Europe is worth two kings!”

  Of the men whom the world currently terms Self-Made—that is, who severally fought their life-battles without the aid of inherited wealth, or family honors, or educational advantages, perhaps our American Franklin stands highest in the civilized world’s regard…. I think I adequately appreciate the greatness of Washington, yet I must place Franklin above him as the consummate type and flowering of human nature under the skies of colonial America. Not that Washington was born to competence and all needful facilities for instruction, so that he began responsible life on vantage ground that Franklin toiled twenty arduous, precious years to reach; I can not feel that this fact has undue weight with me. I realize that there are elements of dignity, of grandeur, in the character of Washington for which that of Franklin affords no parallel. But when I contemplate the immense variety and versatility of Franklin’s services to his country and to mankind; when I think of him as a writer whose first effusions commanded attention in his early boyhood; as a monitor and teacher of his fellow journeymen in a London printing office; as almost from the outset a prosperous and influential editor when journalism had never before been a source of power; as taking his place naturally at the head of the postal service in America, and of the earliest attempts to form a practical confederation of the colonies; when I see him, never an enthusiast, and now nearly three-score-and-ten, renouncing office, hazarding fame, fortune, everything, to struggle for the independence of his country, he having most to lose by failure of any American, his only son a bitter Loyalist, he cheerfully and repeatedly braving the dangers of an ocean swarming with enemies, to render his country the service as ambassador which no other man could perform, and finally, when more than eighty years old, crowning a life of duty and honor by helping to frame that immortal Constitution which made us one nation forever, I cannot place Franklin second to any other American. He could not have done the work of Washington—no other man could; but then he did so many admirable things which Washington had too sound a judgment even to attempt. And, great as Washington was, he was not great enough to write and print after he had achieved power and world-wide fame, a frank, ingenuous confession of his youthful follies and sins for the instruction and admonition of others. Many a man can look calmly down the throats of roaring cannon who lacks the courage and true philanthropy essential to those called to render this service to mankind.

  Men have lived who were more magnificently endowed than Franklin. Men have lived whose lives were more splendid and heroic than his. If the inhabitants of the earth were required to select, to represent them in some celestial congress composed of the various orders of intelligent beings, a specimen of the human race, and we should send a Shakespeare, the celestials would say, He is one of us; or a Napoleon, the fallen angels might claim him. But if we desired to select a man who could present in his own character the largest amount of human worth with the least of human frailty, and in his own lot on earth the largest amount of enjoyment with the least of suffering; one whose character was estimable without being too exceptionally good, and his lot happy without being too generally unattainable; one who could bear in his letter of credence, with the greatest truth, This is a Man, and his life on earth was such as good men may live, I know not who, of the renowned of all ages, we could more fitly choose to represent us in that high court of the universe, than Benjamin Franklin, printer, of Philadelphia.

  No one began lower than the poor apprentice of Boston; no one raised himself higher, by his own energy, than did the inventor of the lightning-rod; no one has rendered more splendid services to his country than the diplomatist who signed the peace of 1783 and secured the independence of the United States.

  The ideal American, as he has been painted for us of late, is a man who has shaken off the yoke of definite creeds, while retaining their moral essence, and finds the highest sanctions needed for the conduct of human life in experience tempered by common sense. Franklin is generally supposed to have reached this ideal by anticipation, and there is a half-truth in the supposition. But whoever will study this great master of practical life in the picture here painted by himself, will acknowledge that it is only superficially true, and that if he never lifts us above the earth or beyond the domain of experience and common-sense, he retained himself a strong hold on the invisible which underlies it, and would have been the first to acknowledge that it was this which enabled him to control the accidents of birth, education, and position, and to earn the eternal gratitude and reverence of the great nation over whose birth he watched so wisely and whose character he did so much to form.

  The Declaration did its work; the representative of America in Paris was doing his. Edmund Burke was right when, in a letter to a friend, he remarked that Franklin’s presence in France was in itself a triumph for the Colonies. The man who it was said had “snatched the thunderbolt from heaven and the sceptre from tyrants” received such men as Turgot, who had resigned his portfolio, and Vergennes who was still in power; naturalists, such as Buffon; nobles, such as La Rochefoucauld; philosophers, such as D’Alembert and Helvétius; physicians, such as Cabanis and Vicq d’Azyr; men of letters, such as Rynal, Morellet, and Mably; jurists, such as Malesherbes, the admirer of a country that sent a tallow-chandler’s son as its envoy to a court. All these Franklin charmed and captivated by a power so subtle and magnetic as to be well-nigh indefinable. The people read with admiration the “Science du Bonhomme Richard.” At Paris they called it with praise “a very little book treating great subjects.” Many purchased and read a thin volume which then appeared and which contained the American Colonies’ Constitution. Numbers called on Franklin at his house and discussed public affairs with him. Those who came, those who discussed, those who read were equally ardent for the American struggle.

  To say that his life is the most interesting, the most uniformly successful, yet lived by any American, is bold. But it is nevertheless, strictly true. Not the least of the many glories of our country is the long list of men who, friendless, half-educated, poor, have, by the sheer force of their own abilities, raised themselves from the humblest beginnings to places of eminence and command. Many of these have surpassed him. Some have speculated more deeply on finance, have been more successful as philanthropists, have made greater discoveries in physics, have written books more commonly read than his. Yet not one of them has attained to greatness in so many ways, or has made so lasting an impression on his countrymen. His face is as well known as the face of Washington, and, save that of Washington, is the only one of his time that is now instantly recognized by the great mass of his countrymen. His maxims are in every man’s mouth. His name is, all over the country, bestowed on counties and towns, on streets, on societies, on corporations.

  To this day Franklin is cordially remembered in France. Nor can any one well study the history of the years of his life, which proved so important to his country, without constant reference to the archives of that other country which he loved next to his own.

  One cannot rise from a perusal of these documents without entertaining a higher regard for Benjamin Franklin as a man of feeling. He is generally considered to have been one in whom excess of intellectual activity and Yankee shrewdness overbalanced the exercise of his emotional nature. That he is capable of warm and enduring friendship, however, becomes at once apparent in these genial letters, written by the American printer to his brother printer across the seas.

  He was sanguine by nature, by resolution, and by policy; and his way of alluring good fortune was to welcome it in advance.

  The Frenchman’s American is Benjamin Franklin. It was so when they first began to know him, when he went in and out among them a living man, and it is so to-day, when an even century has closed around his simple tomb. There is something grand in the personality of this man who was able to inspire such deep admiration and such sinister hatred by the same act. Benjamin Franklin was, without doubt, a strong man—a man of strong and positive character, whose friends and enemies were equally strong in their feelings of like and dislike. The men who were ranged as his enemies have been relegated to a second place on the page of history, while those who were his friends stand out boldly in the front rank of the notable characters of the past. If we were asked to say what was the characteristic in Franklin that made him an idol among the French nation, we should answer his versatility. He was the adroit diplomat and the simple bourgeois, the learned philosopher and scientist, and the gay bon vivant and bonhomme. He could write a dispatch or an epigram with equal facility, and he could control the electric fluid and a smoky chimney with equal success. He at turns could be the chivalric courtier or the simple representative of the infant republic, and whatever he did or whatever pose he assumed he was the same peerless Franklin: and now that he has been at rest these hundred years he stands forth on the page of history as the first American—not even second to Washington himself.

  While Thomas Jefferson, with that breadth of statesmanship which characterized all of his labors, kept unceasingly before his view the importance of popular education to reinforce and make effective the operations of the principle of local self-government, on the other hand, Dr. Franklin, himself a noteworthy example of a self-educated man, kept in view the importance of education as the foundation of thrift and social development. These two men seem to have furnished more than any other two men the guiding principles which have prevailed in our civilization, political and social…. Benjamin Franklin stands somewhat in contrast to Jefferson in the fact that he looks more to the social welfare than to the political function of the people. His most pronounced idea is that of thrift. He wishes to have it impressed on each man or woman or child that industry and economy are prime sources of power. But he is in agreement with Thomas Jefferson as to the importance of an elementary education to prepare the citizen for intelligent application of the lessons of industry and thrift.

  The difficulty of a study of Franklin is intensified by the fact that he was the most-sided man that ever appeared in our history, if not, indeed, in history at all. To be comprehended we must know him, not only as a diplomatist, but as the foremost scientist in the world; a most remarkable financier and business manager; an author whose work has a fixed place among the higher classics; a philosopher who found rank with Voltaire and Leibnitz; as Kant expressed it, “the Prometheus of modern days.” John Adams, whose jealousy was irrepressible, wrote from Paris that Franklin’s reputation was “more universal than that of Newton.” Nor do we find our task minified by the fact that Franklin was a man as simple as he was great, as childlike as he was philosophic. Like Lincoln, he loved a joke, but, unlike Lincoln, he put his jokes into state papers. It has been hinted that for this reason no great historic document of the period was intrusted to his pen. His economy was not only political, it was domestic; and in “Poor Richard” popular estimation cannot easily recognize the controlling mind of the world’s affairs and the builder of democracy. He wrote almanacs instead of constitutions. He was as marked for his toleration in theology as for his democracy in statecraft. In both he was clear-sighted and even prophetic, far beyond his age.

  Those persons who knew Franklin, the inventor, only as the genius to whom we owe the lightning rod, will be amazed at the range of his activity. For half a century his mind seems to have been on the alert concerning the why and wherefore of every phenomenon for which the explanation was not apparent. Nothing in nature failed to interest him. Had he lived in an era of patents he might have rivalled Edison in the number of his patentable devices, and had he chosen to make money for such devices, his gains would certainly have been fabulous. As a matter of fact, Franklin never applied for a patent, though frequently urged to do so, and he made no money by his inventions…. The complete list of inventions, devices, and improvements of which Franklin was the originator, or a leading spirit and contributor, is so long a one that a dozen pages would not suffice for it.

  A characteristic as well as a memorable product of colonial civilization at this epoch was Benjamin Franklin, by birth and education a New Englander, by adoption a Pennsylvanian. He cannot be said to have been an offspring of the theocracy, inasmuch as he was a latitudinarian in religion and had a natural son. But he was an offspring of New England Puritanism grown mellow. His commercial shrewdness, his practical inventiveness, his fundamental integrity, his public spirit, his passion for improvement, were native to his community in the phase which it had now reached, no less than were his “Poor Richard” philosophy of life and the absence in him of anything spiritual or romantic. He it was who in his boyhood had suggested to his father that much time might be saved by saying grace at once over a whole barrel of red herrings. He leads up the mighty army of American inventors. At the same time though no revolutionist by nature he was the destined harbinger of the Revolution. He had been the first projector of a general union of the colonies. His figure marks the transition to the revolutionary and national period which is now opening from that of the Puritan commonwealth.

  Humor, indeed, he had so abundantly that it was almost a failing. Like Abraham Lincoln, another typical American, he never shrank from a jest. Like Lincoln, he knew the world well and accepted it for what it was, and made the best of it, expecting no more. But Franklin lacked the spirituality, the faith in the ideal, which was at the core of Lincoln’s character. And here was Franklin’s limitation: what lay outside of the bounds of common sense he did not see—probably he did not greatly care to see; but common sense he had in a most uncommon degree. One of his chief characteristics was curiosity—in the wholesome meaning of that abused word. He never rested till he knew the why and wherefore of all that aroused his attention.

  One of the first men to exhibit this American spirit with an unmistakable touch of greatness and distinction was Benjamin Franklin. It was characteristic of America that this self-made man should become a philosopher, a founder of philosophical societies, an authoritative man of science; that his philosophy of life should be so homely and so practical in its maxims, and uttered with so shrewd a wit; that one region should be his birthplace and another his home; that he should favor effective political union among the colonies from the first, and should play a sage and active part in the establishment of national independence and the planning of a national organization; and that he should represent his countrymen in diplomacy abroad. They could have had no spokesman who represented more sides of their character. Franklin was a sort of multiple American. He was versatile without lacking solidity; he was a practical statesman without ceasing to be a sagacious philosopher. He came of the people, and was democratic; but he had raised himself out of the general mass of unnamed men, and so stood for the democratic law, not of equality, but of self-selection in endeavor. One can feel sure that Franklin would have succeeded in any part of the national life that it might have fallen to his lot to take part in. He will stand the final and characteristic test of Americanism: he would unquestionably have made a successful frontiersman, capable at once of wielding the axe and of administering justice from the fallen trunk.

  He was the Abou ben Adhem of his times. If service is the test of love, few men have loved their fellows better than did this unsentimental, unspiritual homely old body, American’s patron saint of common sense.

  In the long and angry disputes of the American Revolution, the part taken in them by Franklin was very much like that which Socrates might have taken had he been born in Boston in the early part of the eighteenth century, had he been for many years a printer and a politician in Philadelphia, and had he filled at London and Paris the diplomatic stations that were filled by Franklin. Indeed, the likeness between Franklin and Socrates was more than superficial; for, besides the plebeian origin of both and some trace of plebeian manners which clung to both, and the strain of animal coarseness from which neither was ever entirely purified, they both had an amazing insight into human nature in all its grades and phases, they were both indifferent to literary fame, they were both humorists, they both applied their great intellectual gifts in a disciplinary but genial way to the improvement of their fellow-men, and in dealing controversially with the opinions of others they both understood and practised the strategy of coolness, playfulness, an unassuming manner, moderation of statement, the logical parallel, and irony.

  There are, I conceive, two chief reasons why the name of Franklin is so constantly on our lips and his memory so impressed upon our hearts—why, in other words, he really lives for us instead of being a mere fossil in the strata of history. One is that as an embodiment of practical learning, shrewd mother wit, honesty, and patriotism he is a typical and in many respects unapproachable product of true Americanism. The other is that he is the most complete representative of his century that any nation can point to. With regard to the typical character of his Americanism few cavils will be raised, but with regard to the claim that he best represents the eighteenth century there will probably be not a little dissension. Washington, Dr. Johnson, Frederick the Great, and Voltaire might each and all be put in competition with the sage who snatched the lightning from heaven and the sceptre from tyrants, and would have many supporters. But in none of these does the age of prose and reason seem to find such adequate and complete expression as in Franklin. Washington is beyond his own or any century. Dr. Johnson does not sufficiently represent the age on its rational side; Frederick is too extreme a combination of daring and sublime seriousness of purpose and petty affectation; while Voltaire is at once too intense and not radical enough, and is, after all, too entirely a man of letters. Franklin, on the other hand, thoroughly represents his age in its practicality, in its devotion to science, in its intellectual curiosity, in its humanitarianism, in its lack of spirituality, in its calm self-content—in short, in its exaltation of prose and reason over poetry and faith.

  Franklin was now well in the way of prosperity, aged twenty-four, with a little printing business; plans plus, and ambitions to spare. He had had his little fling in life, and had done various things of which he was ashamed; and the foolish things that Deborah had done were no worse than those of which he had been guilty. So he called on her, and they talked it over and made honest confessions that are good for the soul. The potter disappeared—no one knew where—some said he was dead, but Benjamin and Deborah did not wear mourning. They took rumor’s word for it, and thanked God, and went to a church and were married. Deborah brought to the firm a very small dowry; and Benjamin contributed a bright baby boy, aged two years, captured no one knows just where. This boy was William Franklin, who grew up into a very excellent man, and the worst that can be said of him is, that he became Governor of New Jersey. He loved and respected his father, and called Deborah mother, and loved her very much. And she was worthy of all love and ever treated him with tenderness and gentlest considerate care. Possibly a blot on the ’scutcheon may, in the working of God’s providence, not always be a dire misfortune, for it sometimes has the effect of binding broken hearts as nothing else can, a citatrice toughens the fibre. Deborah had not much education, but she had good, sturdy common sense, which is better if you are forced to make choice. She set herself to help her husband in every way possible and so far as I know, never sighed for one of those things you call “a career.” She even worked in the printing office, folding, stitching, and doing up bundles. Long years afterward, when Franklin was Ambassador of the American Colonies in France, he told with pride that the clothes he wore were spun, woven, cut out, and made into garments all by his wife’s own hands. Franklin’s love for Deborah was very steadfast. Together they became rich and respected, won world-wide fame, and honors came that way such as no American before or since has ever received.

  Franklin was a rather large man, and is supposed to have been about five feet ten inches in height. In his youth he was stout, and in old age corpulent and heavy, with rounded shoulders. The portraits of him reveal a very vigorous-looking man, with a thick upper arm and a figure which, even in old age, was full and rounded. In fact, this rounded contour is his most striking characteristic…. Franklin’s figure was a series of harmonious curves, which make pictures of him always pleasing. These curves extended over his head and even to the lines of his face, softening the expression, slightly veiling the iron resolution, and entirely consistent with the wide sympathies, varied powers, infinite shrewdness, and vast experience which we know he possessed.

  Benjamin Franklin is considered all over the world a polyhistor of the foremost rank. Nothing escaped his attention. However, it was not merely of a receptive kind. Like Leonardo da Vinci, our “patriot and sage,” as he was called in eulogies, never received without giving. Whoever went through John Bigelow’s edition of Franklin’s complete works knows that he suggested inventions and improvements, not only in electricity, printing, flying machines—the latter in the modern sense, not of fast stage coaches, as in the terminology of the eighteenth century—optics, chemistry, submarine boats, but also in very many other directions. Strangely enough, the invention of the musical glasses, or harmonica, which since more than a hundred and thirty years has been attributed to Franklin, was not his invention. He only suggested some important improvements…. Benjamin Franklin possessed a keen interest for music and a certain knowledge of its literature. But so far, with exception of his traditional invention of the musical glasses, he did not surpass the many other lovers of music in colonial America…. He can justly be classified among the most critical and boldest writers on musical declamation of that period. Very few critics and professional musicians had or have equally independent esthetical reasoning powers, and certainly the contemporaneous artists, when “talking shop” with Franklin, have haughtily sneered at the ideas of the musical greenhorn from the American prairies and backwoods.

  He acted at one time as a commander of troops, yet cannot be called a soldier; he was a great statesman, yet not among the greatest; he made famous discoveries in science, yet was scarcely a professional scientist; he was lauded as a philosopher, yet barely outstepped the region of common sense; he wrote ever as a moralist, yet in some respects lived a free life; he is one of the few great American authors, yet never published a book; he was a shrewd economist, yet left at his death only a moderate fortune; he accomplished much as a philanthropist, yet never sacrificed his own weal. Above all and in all things he was a man, able to cope with every chance of life and wring profit out of it; he had perhaps the alertest mind of any man of that alert century. In his shrewdness, versatility, self-reliance, wit, as also in his lack of the deeper reverence and imagination, he, I think, more than any other man who has yet lived, represents the full American character.

The Hutchinson Letters

  Sir,—Finding that two gentlemen have been unfortunately engaged in a duel about a transaction and its circumstances of which both of them are totally ignorant and innocent, I think it incumbent upon me to declare (for the prevention of further mischief, as far as such a declaration may contribute to prevent it) that I alone am the person who obtained and transmitted to Boston the letters in question. Mr. Whately could not communicate them, because they were never in his possession; and for the same reason they could not be taken from him by Mr. Temple. They were not of the nature of private letters between friends. They were written by public officers to persons in public stations on public affairs, and intended to procure public measures; they were therefore handed to other public persons, who might be influenced by them to produce those measures. Their tendency was to incense the mother country against her colonies, and, by the steps recommended, to widen the breach which they effected. The chief caution expressed with regard to privacy was, to keep their contents from the colony agents, who, the writers apprehended, might return them, or copies of them, to America. That apprehension was, it seems, well founded, for the first agent who laid his hands on them thought it his duty to transmit them to his constituents.

  I hope, my lords, you will mark and brand the man, for the honour of this country, of Europe, and of mankind. Private correspondence has hitherto been held sacred in times of the greatest party rage, not only in politics, but in religion. The betrayer of it has forfeited all the respect of the good, and of his own associates. Into what companies will the fabricator of this iniquity hereafter go with an unembarrassed face, or with any semblance of the honest intrepidity of virtue? Men will watch him with a jealous eye—they will hide their papers from him, and lock up their escritoires. Having hitherto aspired after fame by his writings, he will henceforth esteem it a libel to be called a man of letters—“homo trium literarum.” But he not only took away these papers from one brother,—he kept himself concealed till he nearly occasioned the murder of another. It is impossible to read his account, expressive of the coolest and most deliberate malice, without horror. Amidst these tragical events, of one person nearly murdered—of another answerable for the issue—of a worthy governor hurt in the dearest interests—the fate of America in suspense—here is a man who, with the utmost insensibility or remorse, stands up and avows himself the author of all. I can compare him only to Zanga in Dr. Young’s Revenge

	——“Know, then, ’twas I.
	I forged the letter—I disposed the picture—
	I hated, I despised—and I destroy!”

I ask, my Lords, whether the revengeful temper attributed by poetic fiction only to the bloody-minded African, is not surpassed by the coolness and apathy of the wily New Englander?

  The character of the inquiry, and the dignity of the tribunal to whose investigation it was submitted, were not duly considered. Ministers, taught by experience, ought to have known the degradation which they must inevitably incur when they elevated an individual into the rank of a personal opponent…. Dr. Franklin, who had recently completed his sixty-seventh year, who was known and honoured in the most eminent philosophical and literary societies in Europe, sat with his grey, unadorned locks, a hearer of one of the severest invectives that ever proceeded from the tongue of man, and an observer of a boisterous and obstreperous merriment and exultation, which added nothing to the dignity of his judges. He had sufficient self-command to suppress all display of feeling; but the transactions of the day sunk deeply into his mind, and produced an unextinguishable rancour against this country, which coloured all the acts of his subsequent life, and occasioned extensive and ever memorable consequences.

  The conduct of Franklin in the affair of the letters was unworthy a man of honour and a gentleman.

  As we review the whole story of the transaction of this day, in cool blood, we can hardly understand how it occurred; and there are those on the other side of the ocean, if not on our own side, who fail to perceive how it could have been justified, as it was, by so many of our calmest, wisest, and most conscientious patriots. For, certainly, the men who were intrusted with the letters were second to none in Massachusetts for integrity and principle. Chauncy and Cooper, as we all know, were Doctors of Divinity, who could hardly have been invited to take part in an unworthy act. Doctor Winthrop—very remotely connected with myself, and of whom I may therefore speak without delicacy—was the foremost man of science at Harvard University, a member, too, of the Royal Society, and a gentleman of the highest character. And Bowdoin, who stands first on the list, would have been singled out among all the patriots of that period as a man of the greatest moderation, of inflexible principle, and of the nicest sense of honor. Yet Bowdoin, in a letter to Franklin of Sept. 6, 1774, calls the sending of the letters “that most meritorious act;” and I am not aware of any other view of the affair having been expressed, at the time it occurred, by him, or by any other of our Revolutionary Fathers.

  It must be confessed that the question whether Franklin should have sent these letters to be seen by the leading men of Massachusetts involves points of some delicacy. The very elaborateness and vehemence of the exculpations put forth by American writers indicate a lurking feeling that the opposite side is at least plausible. I add my opinion decidedly upon Franklin’s side, though I certainly see force in the contrary view. Yet before one feels fully satisfied he would wish to know from whom these letters came to Franklin’s hands, the information then given him concerning them, and the authority which the giver might be supposed to have over them, in a word, all the attendant and qualifying circumstances and conversation upon which presumptions might have been properly founded by Franklin. Upon these essential matters there is absolutely no evidence. Franklin was bound to secrecy concerning them, at whatever cost to himself. But it is evident that Franklin never for an instant entertained the slightest doubt of the entire propriety of his action, and even in his own cause he was wont to be a fair-minded judge.

Poor Richard’s Almanac, 1733

  COURTEOUS READER:—I might attempt in this place to gain thy favor by declaring that I write Almanacs with no other view than that of the public good, but in this I should not be sincere…. The plain truth of the matter is, I am excessive poor, and my wife, good woman, is, I tell her, excessive proud: she cannot bear, she says to sit spinning in her shift of tow, while I do nothing but gaze at the stars; and has threatened more than once to burn all my books and rattling traps (as she calls my instruments) if I do not make some profitable use of them for the good of my family. The printer has offered me some considerable share of the profits, and I have thus begun to comply with my dame’s desire.

  While in this weary state of suspense, a prey to impatience, anxiety, and mortification, Jones happened one day to be looking over an old number of Franklin’s Pennsylvania Almanac, when his attention was struck with the saying of Poor Richard: “If you would have your business done, go; if not, send.” It immediately occurred to him, that the delay of his own business was in no slight degree owing to his having so long remained at a distance, sending letters to court, instead of going to attend to it in person. He set out forthwith for the capital, and made such good speed in his errand, that, ere many days had elapsed, he received from the reluctant M. de Sartine, the following conclusive letter, dated at Versailles, on the 4th of February, 1779…. Feeling that his final success in obtaining a command had been owing to his having adopted the good advice which he had met with in Dr. Franklin’s Almanac, and out of compliment to the sage, for whom his veneration was so unbounded, Paul Jones had asked leave, as appears by M. Sartine’s letter, to give the ship of which the command was now conferred upon him, the name of the Bon Homme Richard, the Poor Richard: a name which his heroism was destined to render as enduring as his own.

  “But, pray, dear father, tell us what made him so famous,” said George. “I have seen his portrait a great many times. There is a wooden bust of him in one of our streets; and marble ones, I suppose in some other places. And towns, and ships of war, and steamboats, and banks, and academies, and children, are often named after Franklin. Why should he have grown so very famous?” “Your question is a reasonable one, George,” answered his father. “I doubt whether Franklin’s philosophical discoveries, important as they were, or even his vast political services, would have given him all the fame which he acquired. It appears to me that ‘Poor Richard’s Almanac’ did more than anything else towards making him familiarly known to the public. As the writer of those proverbs which Poor Richard was supposed to utter, Franklin became the counsellor and household friend of almost every family in America. Thus it was the humblest of all his labors that has done the most for his fame.”

  Some of the best fun Franklin ever wrote, occurs in the prefaces to “Poor Richard.”… “Poor Richard,” at this day, would be reckoned an indecent production. All great humorists were more or less indecent before Charles Dickens; i. e., they used certain words which are now never pronounced by polite persons, and are never printed by respectable printers; and they referred freely to certain subjects which are familiar to every living creature, but which, it is now agreed among civilized beings, shall not be topics of conversation. In this respect, “Poor Richard” was no worse, and not much better, than other colonial periodicals, some of which contained things incredibly obscene; as much so as the broadest passages of Sterne, Smollett, Fielding, and Defoe.

  The almanac went year after year, for a quarter of a century, into the house of nearly every shopkeeper, planter, and farmer in the American provinces. Its wit and humor, its practical tone, its shrewd maxims, its worldly honesty, its morality of common sense, its useful information, all chimed well with the national character. It formulated in homely phrase and with droll illustration what the colonists more vaguely knew, felt, and believed upon a thousand points of life and conduct. In so doing it greatly trained and invigorated the natural mental traits of the people. “Poor Richard” was the revered and popular schoolmaster of a young nation during its period of tutelage. His teachings are among the powerful forces which have gone to shaping the habits of Americans. His terse and picturesque bits of the wisdom and the virtue of this world are familiar in our mouths to-day; they moulded our great-grandparents and their children; they have informed our popular traditions; they still influence our actions, guide our ways of thinking, and establish our points of view, with the constant control of acquired habits which we little suspect. If we were accustomed still to read the literature of the almanac, we should be charmed with its humor. The world has not yet grown away from it, nor ever will. Addison and Steele had more polish but vastly less humor than Franklin. “Poor Richard” has found eternal life by passing into the daily speech of the people, while the “Spectator” is fast being crowded out of the hands of all save scholars in literature.

  “Poor Richard’s Almanac” was so much the best that it soon took the place of all others, and its wise maxims were in people’s mouths nearly as often as Bible verses. Indeed, I have heard people quote Franklin’s proverbs as Solomon’s, though they are generally very different. These homely sayings had a wonderful effect on the New England colonists: they helped to make them sharp, business-like, active, cautious, hard-working, saving. Franklin was the first well-known type and the best type of the true “Yankee.”

  Franklin’s Almanack, his crowning work in the sphere of journalism, published under the pseudonym of Richard Saunders,—better known since as Poor Richard,—is still one of the marvels of modern literature. Under one or another of many titles the contents of this publication, exclusive of its calendars, have been translated into every tongue having any pretensions to a literature; and have had more readers, probably, than any other publication in the English or indeed in any other language, with the single exception of the Bible. It was the first issue from an American press that found a popular welcome in foreign lands, and it still enjoys the special distinction of being the only almanac ever published that owed its extraordinary popularity entirely to its literary merit. What adds to the surprise with which we contemplate the fame and fortunes of this unpretentious publication, is the fact that its reputation was established by its first number, and when its author was only twenty-six years of age. For a period of twenty-six years, and until Franklin ceased to edit it, this annual was looked forward to by a larger portion of the colonial population and with more impatience than now awaits a President’s annual message to Congress.

  And thus for a quarter of a century or more Poor Richard preached his little line-long sermons, year after year; sermons from very old texts, many of them—waifs of common knowledge or tradition—Biblical many of them and as old as Solomon, but given a new twang by quaint or sharp wording, which set them upon new and wider flight. Let us not speak reproachfully of the stealing; ’tis a good sort of stealing, like Chaucer’s in his “Canterbury Tales;” whoever can put new force and new beauty into an old truth by his method of re-stating it, is doing good work—doing indeed what most of the good sermonizers are bent upon. No matter what old metal you may use, if you can put enough of your own powder behind it ’twill reach the mark.

  It was in “Poor Richard,” indeed, that we see Franklin in his most striking light as a philosopher of the people—a hard-headed, practical thinker, an epigrammatic moralist, and an exploiter or adapter of adages, almost any one of which might have made him famous. For Mr. Saunders had a terse way of telling plain truths, and while his sayings were not, for the most part, exactly original, nearly every one of them, even when a more modern setting to an ancient saw, bore the hall-mark of Franklin’s genius for apt expression.

Autobiography

  From the poverty and obscurity in which I was born, and in which I passed my earliest years, I have raised myself to a state of affluence and some degree of celebrity in the world. As constant good fortune has accompanied me even to an advanced period of life, my posterity will perhaps be desirous of learning the means which I employed, and which, thanks to Providence, so well succeeded with me. They may also deem them fit to be imitated, should any of them find themselves in similar circumstances. This good fortune, when I reflect on it, which is frequently the case, has induced me sometimes to say, that if it were left to my choice, I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first. So would I also wish to change some incidents of it for others more favourable. Notwithstanding, if this condition was denied, I should still accept the offer of recommencing the same life. But as this repetition is not to be expected, that which resembles most living one’s life over again, seems to be to recall all the circumstances of it; and, to render this remembrance more durable, to record them in writing. In thus employing myself I shall yield to the inclination so natural to old men, of talking of themselves and their own actions; and I shall indulge it without being tiresome to those who, from respect to my age, might conceive themselves obliged to listen to me, since they will be always free to read me or not.

  There is a simplicity in this book which charms us in the same way with the humorous touches of nature in the “Vicar of Wakefield.” Franklin’s Boston brother in the printing-office,—irascible, jealous, and mortified on the return of the successful adventurer, who is playing off his prosperity before the workmen, is an artist’s picture of life, drawn in a few conclusive touches. So, too, is Keimer as happily hit off as any personage in Gil Blas, particularly in that incident at the break-up of Franklin’s system of vegetable diet, which he had adopted; he invites his journeymen and two women friends to dine with him, providing a roast pig for the occasion, which being prematurely served up, is devoured by the enthusiast, before the company arrives; in that effective sketch, in a paragraph of the Philadelphia City Croaker, whose ghost still walks every city in the world, mocking prosperity of every degree,—“a person of note, an elderly man, with a wise look and a very grave manner of speaking.”

  Of this fragment of “Autobiography” I have sometimes been imprudent enough to say, that it is the only piece of writing yet produced on the continent of America which is likely to be generally known two centuries hence.

  It is now eighty years since the death of Dr. Franklin, and during this time his “Autobiography” has been more extensively read in this country than any other historical work. It was, perhaps, the earliest American book that acquired and sustained a great popularity.

  Wherever he lived he was the inevitable centre of a system of influences always important and constantly enlarging; and dying, he perpetuated it by an autobiography which to this day not only remains one of the most widely read and readable books in our language, but has had the distinction of enriching the literature of nearly every other. No man has ever lived whose life has been more universally studied by his countrymen or is more familiar to them.

  A greater Autobiography than Edward Gibbon’s is our own Benjamin Franklin’s. Franklin had exactly the genius and temperament of an autobiographer. He loved and admired himself; but he was so bent upon analysis and measurement that he could not let even himself pass without discrimination. The style is like Defoe. Indeed we are pleased to find that he placed great value both on Defoe and Bunyan, whose stories are told so like his own. He watches his own life as he watched one of his own philosophical experiments. He flies his existence as he flew his kite, and tells the world about it all just as a thoughtful boy might tell his mother what he had been doing—sure of her kindly interest in him. The world is like a mother to Ben Franklin always: so domestic and familiar is his thought of her. He who has read this book has always afterward the boy-man who wrote it clear and distinct among the men he knows.

  But to Benjamin Franklin’s “Autobiography” I feel that I owe more than to any other book, and the greatest literary treasure I own is an old edition of this work, in two tiny volumes, printed in London in 1799. I picked it up at a book sale some years ago for fifty cents. It is a very rare edition, I believe, and is not to be found in the Stevens collection of Franklin’s works, now in the possession of our government.

  The style of this work is inimitable; it is as simple, direct, and idiomatic as Bunyan’s; it is a style which no rhetorician can assist us to attain, and which the least touch of the learned critic would spoil.

General

  I am very sorry that you intend soon to leave our hemisphere. America has sent us many good things,—gold, silver, sugar, tobacco, indigo, and so forth; but you are the first philosopher, and indeed the first great man of letters, for whom we are beholden to her.

  One of the first philosophers, one of the most eminent literary characters, as well as one of the most important in the political world, that the present age can boast of.

  The peculiar charm of his writings, and his great merit also in action, consisted in the clearness with which he saw his object,—and the bold and steady pursuit of it, by the surest and the shortest road. He never suffered himself, in conduct, to be turned aside by the seductions of interest or vanity, or to be scared by hesitation and fear, or to be misled by the arts of his adversaries. Neither did he, in discussion, ever go out of his way in search of ornament, or stop short from dread of the consequences. He never could be caught, in short, acting absurdly, or writing nonsensically:—at all times, and in every thing he undertook, the vigour of an understanding, at once original and practical, was distinctly perceivable. But it must not be supposed that his writings are devoid of ornament or amusement. The latter especially abounds in almost all he ever composed; only nothing is sacrificed to them. On the contrary, they come most naturally into their places; and they uniformly help on the purpose in hand, of which neither writer nor reader ever loses sight for an instant. Thus, his style has all the vigour and even conciseness of Swift, without any of his harshness. It is in no degree more flowery, yet both elegant and lively. The wit, or rather humour, which prevails in his works, varies with the subject. Sometimes he is bitter and sarcastic; oftener gay, and even droll; reminding us, in this respect, far more frequently of Addison than of Swift, as might be naturally expected from his admirable temper, or the happy turn of his imagination…. There is nothing more delightful than the constancy with which those amiable feelings, those sound principles, those truly profound views of human affairs, make their appearance at every opportunity, whether the immediate subject be speculative or practical—of a political, or of a general, description…. We have said little respecting his language, which is pure, and English. A few, and but a few, foreign expressions may be traced, and these French, rather than American; as, for instance, influential. Indeed, we cannot reckon him more as an American than an European.

  Taken all together, this collection of letters would, we think, in the absence of all other documents and representations, afford sufficient means for a competent estimate of the writer. The character displayed by them is an unusual combination of elements. The main substance of the intellectual part of it is a superlative good sense, evinced and acting in all the modes of that high endowment; such as an intuitively prompt and perfect, and steadily continuing apprehension; a sagacity which with admirable ease strikes through all superficial and delusive appearances of things to the essence and the true relations; a faculty of reasoning in a manner marvelously simple, direct, and decisive; a power of reducing a subject or question to its plainest principles; an unaffected daring to meet whatever is to be opposed, in an explicit, direct manner, and in the point of its main strength; a facility for applying familiar truths and self-evident propositions, for resolving the most uncommon difficulties; and a happy adroitness of illustration, by parallel cases, supposed or real, the real ones being copiously supplied by a large and most observant acquaintance with the world. It is obvious how much this same accurate observation of the world would contribute to that power of interpreting the involuntary indications of character, and of detecting motives and designs in all sorts of persons he had to deal with, and to that foresight of consequences in all practical concerns, in which he was probably never surpassed.

  Though after the first conception of an electrical charge as a disturbance of equilibrium, there was nothing in the development or details of Franklin’s views which deserved to win for them any peculiar authority, his reputation, and his skill as a writer, gave a considerable influence to his opinions. Indeed, for a time he was considered, over a large part of Europe, as the creator of the science, and the terms, Franklinism, Franklinist, Franklinian system, occur in almost every page of continental publications on the subject. Yet the electrical phenomena to the knowledge of which Franklin added least, those of induction, were those by which the progress of the theory was most promoted.

  Few writers have been so regardless of literary reputation as Franklin. Scarcely any of his compositions were published under his own eye; many of them were not written for the press; and the fame of authorship appears rarely to have been among the motives by which he was induced to employ his pen. It is true, that, in early life and afterwards, he cultivated with uncommon assiduity the art of writing, till he attained a mastery over the language, which has raised his name to the first rank in English literature. Yet it was his primary object, not so much to become distinguished by this accomplishment; as to acquire the power of acting on the minds of others, and of communicating, in the most attractive and effectual manner, such discoveries as he might make, and his schemes for the general improvement, the moral culture, the comfort, the happiness of mankind. He seldom affixed his name to any of his writings. They were mostly designed for a particular purpose; and, when they had answered the end for which they were intended, he seems to have given himself little concern about their future destiny.

  The beginner of this literature, amiable and subtle scholar of Defoe and Addison, was Benjamin Franklin. He announced the advent of a milder and more indulgent civilization. Addison’s apologue and delicacy; the popular, plain-speaking of Defoe and Bunyan, were softened and melted into a pleasant composition, which characterized the first essays of colonial literature, essays remarkable for the sobriety of their tone, and the absence of high color. Imagination, magnificent and dangerous gift, is not found in the works of Franklin, nor do any of his contemporaries or friends possess it.

  If ever the doctrine of saving has attained a sort of homely poetry of expression, by dint of contentment and liveliness, it is in Franklin that we must seek for it. An inner warmth of sentiment animates his prudence; a ray of sunshine illumines and enlivens his honesty…. Franklin’s correspondence in these years is most agreeable and soothing reading; the perfect balance, the precision, the absence of all evil passion and of all heat, the good use to which he puts even his enemies, an affectionate sentiment which mingles with a correct appreciation of things, and which banishes dryness, an elevated sentiment whenever necessary, a certain lightsome air diffused over the whole, compose a real treasure of morality and wisdom. Compared with the Correspondence of Voltaire, that of Franklin gives rise to many reflections; everything there is wholesome, upright, and animated as it were with a lively and constant serenity. Franklin possessed gay, clear, and brilliant good sense; he called bad temper the uncleanliness of the mind.

  He wrote no elaborate histories, or learned treatises, or stately tomes. Short essays or tracts, thrown off at a heat to answer an immediate end,—letters to his associates in science or politics,—letters to his family and friends,—these make up the great bulk of his literary productions; and under the admirable editorship of Mr. Sparks, nine noble volumes do they fill,—abounding in evidences of a wisdom, sagacity, ingenuity, diligence, freshness of thought, fullness of information, comprehensiveness of reach, and devotedness of purpose, such as are rarely to be found associated in any single man.

  The pervading trait of Franklin’s character was allegiance to the practical. Few devotees of knowledge have so consistently manifested this instinct, the more remarkable because united to speculative tendencies which quickened his intelligence and occupied his leisure to the very close of his existence. For the intangible aims of the metaphysician, the vagaries of the imaginative, the “airy bubble reputation,” he exhibited no concern; but the application of truth to the facts of nature and of life, the discovery of material laws and their conversion to human welfare, the actual influence of morals, economy, politics, and education, upon civil society and individual development, were problems upon which he never failed to think, read, talk, write, and experiment.

  Wrote several miscellaneous papers, scientific and political, which have doubtless had no small influence in forming American style…. His writings are remarkable for simplicity, terseness, and force. Both the language and the illustrations fit the meaning with emphatic closeness. He affects no graces of style: a hard-headed, practical man, he seeks to convey his meaning as briefly and as emphatically as possible.

  The venerable Nestor of three generations; born in the old puritan time, with the shades of the past hanging about his home; traversing the military period of two wars, from Wolfe to Washington, from Quebec to Yorktown; privileged to partake of the new era of laws and legislation—the old sage, full of years and honors, has now at length finished his work. He has inaugurated a new period in philosophy; he has heralded new principles in politics, he has shown his countrymen how to think and write; he has embalmed the wisdom of his life in immortal compositions; he has blessed two great cities with associations of pleasure and profit clustering about his name; he has become the property of the nation and the world; there is nothing further but retirement and death.

  Franklin is not often spoken of as a witty man, but his wit was as remarkable as his statesmanship. I think that he would have had as much wit as Swift or as Voltaire if he had but cultivated this talent. Only his clear, practical good sense predominated, and he never showed himself in the capacity of a humorist save when some practical purpose was to be affected by it.

  Our humorous writers, with a few exceptions, are not strictly national. Even Franklin, our first, best humorist, stifled his humor in the Addisonian style. His was too earnest a character to make the humorous trait very prominent; but his sly, shining threads of observation, intertwisted into the strong strand of his practical sense, have had their effect on the older men of this generation.

  In whom the acuteness of the philosopher was curiously blended with the cunning of the trader.

  Of Franklin then it must be said, that he not only did not advance the growth of economic science, but that he seems not even to have mastered it as it was already developed; and little more can be said for any of our public men or writers during the period of Franklin’s activity.

  He employed his admirable style, his lucid thought, in defending before the world the rights of man. Calmness was the chief trait of his intellect; his political pieces have a weight and clearness that few others have attained; the fierce but clouded reasoning of Junius, the rude splendor of Johnson, the thoughtful verbiage of Burke, grow feeble and overstrained when placed by the side of one of Franklin’s irrefutable arguments. His was the voice of humanity, the opening of an age of reason.

  I intended in these pages to limit my remarks to Franklin’s scientific position, but that would be to represent very inadequately the whole life of this great man. Let us remember that his electrical researches, on which his scientific celebrity must mainly depend, occupied at the most only seven or eight years, and then were abandoned because of the pressure of political affairs. Not by his scientific life, but by his political, will Franklin be judged of by his countrymen. In that his true grandeur is seen. He conducted the foreign affairs that gave independence to America. No other American could have stood in his place, and have done what he did. Very true, his scientific reputation gave him position before the eyes of the French court, and added force to his urgent entreaties for money and an army and a fleet to aid his struggling countrymen. No one can rise from a perusal of his political writings, from the time of the Albany Commission to the close of his eventful life, without recognizing his great intellectual ability, his political foresight. To meet the trained statesmen of England, to conduct successfully to a close negotiations which were the most important in which they could engage, since the partition, the disruption, of the British Empire was involved, demanded a clear head, a piercing eye, and a calm judgment. The result he accomplished was of far more importance to mankind than any philosophical experiment he ever made—a vast continent dedicated to human freedom. Contemplated from this point of view, Franklin appears as one of the greatest men of his generation. His electrical discoveries, brilliant as they were, were only embellishments of his life.

  Franklin is, indeed, one of the very small class of men who can be said to have added something of real value to the art of living. Very few writers have left so many profound and original observations on the causes of success in life, and on the best means of cultivating the intellect and the character. To extract from surrounding circumstances the largest possible amount of comfort and rational enjoyment, was the ideal he placed before himself and others, and he brought to its attainment one of the shrewdest and most inventive of human intellects, one of the calmest and best balanced of human characters.

  Edwards would doubtless have considered Franklin a child of wrath, but Francis Bacon would have hailed him as one of that band of explorers, who, by serving Nature, will in the end master her mysteries, and use their knowledge for the service of man. Indeed, the cheerful, hopeful spirit which runs through Franklin’s writings, even when he was tried by obstacles which might have tasked the proverbial patience of Job, is not one of the least of his claims upon the consideration of those who rightfully glory in having such a genius for their countrymen. The spirit which breathes through Franklin’s life and works is that which has inspired every pioneer of our Western wastes, every poor farmer who has tried to make both ends meet by the exercise of rigid economy, every inventor who has attempted to serve men by making machines do half the drudgery of their work, every statesman who has striven to introduce large principles into our somewhat confused and contradictory legislation, every American diplomatist who has upheld the character of his country abroad by sagacity in managing men, as well as by integrity in the main purpose of his mission, and every honest man who has desired to diminish the evil there is in the world, and to increase every possible good that is conformable to good sense. Franklin is doubtless our Mr. Worldly Wiseman, but his worldly wisdom ever points to the Christian’s prayer that God’s will shall be done on earth as it is done in heaven.

  The truth about Franklin as a miscellaneous writer—a truth which any one may verify by a day’s reading in his collected works—is that most of his productions, while respectable, of wide range, well-written, sensible, and telling, are not of the highest rank, and that, measured by the tests of English literature between 1725 and 1775, they are commonplace. From the several editions of his works but three things stand out because of inherent literary merit: his “Autobiography,” his highly important papers on electricity, and the maxims in “Poor Richard’s Almanac”—the last being chief and sufficient in themselves to perpetuate his fame as a writer.

  Franklin was admirably equipped as a popular teacher. Long study of the best models of English prose, aided by his fine literary sense, gave him a style unsurpassed for clearness and directness; while his rich vein of humor, his command of satire, of anecdote, and of terse, sententious phrase, enabled him to convey large truths in such portable and attractive forms, that his teachings soon spread far and wide, and fixed themselves in the memory and speech of men. But here, as in all cases, that which gave most weight to his teachings were the character and the life of the teacher. He made the newspaper press a power for good, as it had never been before; and he set the example, and adhered to it throughout his editorial career, of preserving the columns of his paper free from all libelling and personal abuse, and all purveying to the prurient taste of a section of the community.

  The place to be allotted Franklin among American men of Letters is hard to determine. He founded no school of literature. He gave no impetus to letters. He put his name to no great work of history, of poetry, of fiction. Till after his day, no such thing as American literature existed. To place him, with respect to Irving, Bryant, Cooper, Prescott, and the host of great men that came after him, is impossible. There is no common ground of comparison. Unlike them, he never wrote for literary fame. Had he cared for such fame, he would not have permitted friends and strangers to gather and edit his writings during his lifetime; he would not have suffered death to overtake him when the Autobiography was but half done; he would not have made it an invariable rule to never send anything to the press over his own name. His place is among that giant race of pamphleteers and essayists most of whom went before, but a few of whom came immediately after, the war for independence. And among them he is easily first. Their merit lies in what they said: the merit of Franklin lies not only in what he said, but in the way in which he said it…. No other writer has left so many just and original observations on success in life. No other writer has pointed out so clearly the way to obtain the greatest amount of comfort out of life. What Solomon did for the spiritual man that did Franklin for the earthly man. The Book of Proverbs is a collection of receipts for laying up treasures in heaven. “Poor Richard” is a collection of receipts for laying up treasures on earth.

  By far the most eminent of the early American writers was Benjamin Franklin…. Franklin’s style is notoriously graceful and charming, but he is almost the only American writer before the Independence who can be named with the recognised masters of eighteenth-century English.

  Franklin is perhaps the real starting-point of American literature. As he was the first American scientific discoverer of renown, the first American diplomatist, the founder of the first public library and the first permanent philosophical society in this country, so he was the first writer in the field of general literature. His writings are full of acute thought on practical themes, and suited to the genius of a busy people engrossed with their outward affairs.

  He could so marry words to things as to make them seem one; he expressed positive thoughts and emotions, without ornament or amplification; his style was the true reflection of his intellectual and moral stature. He was, it is true, the first American to cultivate the art of literary phrasing; but this was an instinct of his temperament, which loved pith, point, clearness and homely symbolism…. Humor was another of Franklin’s literary gifts, and literary, in his case, because it was first personal. It was not the thin, smirking artifice which is regarded as humor by some of our contemporary writers, and which is as carefully studied as a new dialect or a recondite title; it was the native, ineradicable quality of the man, the natural armor of his strength, his worldly wisdom, his kindly human sympathy and his shrewd Yankee insight. Many a portentous predicament had he faced in his day, but he was never for a moment scared out of his humor. It forms the predominating flavor of his writings, which are almost always in earnest, but seldom quite solemn; the demure twinkle of the eye is there, though the hasty or the foolish miss it. It was sometimes a trifle broad for modern taste, but it is of itself enough to preserve his productions from oblivion.

  He had a gift for putting much prudence into few words. His low ideals and the self-complacence which appear in his autobiography do him little credit, but as a counselor in matters of expediency he was much needed by his excitable, extravagant, and often over-sanguine countrymen.

  It is the tradition of his life that has survived rather than any wide knowledge of what he wrote. No figure in our history is more generally remembered, nor any more deservedly; for whatever his merits on a moral scale, the man was in his life first, last, and always an American. Shrewd common-sense never had a more palpable incarnation; nor that peculiar, ever-present, not needlessly obtrusive personal independence which so generally makes a native Yankee, wherever he goes, a troublesome match for people who assume to be his betters. Himself, then, we remember first; and if we are suddenly asked what he was besides being himself, our impulse would be in conveniently general terms to answer that he was a statesman and a philosopher.

  Either we must be willing to give a place in economic science to Franklin, or we must deny the same privilege to all writers on economic matters who preceded Adam Smith. It is true that Franklin was largely a man of expedients, if by that we mean that he was interested in that truth which could be immediately applied for the good of mankind. But we maintain also that Franklin was a man who understood thoroughly the working of certain economic principles. No one else saw more clearly than he did the injurious effect of the many trade restrictions prevalent in the civilized world in his day. In that “great reaction of the eighteenth century against artificial conditions of life,” in that movement of liberty, industrial as well as political, we claim that Franklin was one of the first as well as one of the leading factors. And it must be admitted that on the subject of population he did not always indulge in the “crudest speculations as to the operation of causes in any degree remote.” No one knew better than he did the causes both of the increase of population and of the adjustment of people among the nations of the earth.

  We might be led to believe at first thought that the extraordinary repute into which he rose was relative, and that the world’s appreciation of him, and particularly the feeling of his own countrymen, was exaggerated by the surprise that the colonies, then so young and primitive, should have produced so able and versatile a man. But this would be an incorrect view. Franklin’s fame was a tribute to his real eminence. The more his life and achievements are studied the more clearly does it appear that Franklin’s greatness was of the whole world and would have been as prominent in any age; and that in any group of leaders of progress, from whatever time or nation they might be selected, he would find his place near the head.

  The Doric simplicity of his style; his incomparable facility of condensing a great principle into an apologue or an anecdote, many of which, as he applied them, have become the folk-lore of all nations: his habitual moderation of statement, his aversion to exaggeration, his inflexible logic, and his perfect truthfulness,—made him one of the most persuasive men of his time, and his writings a model which no one can study without profit. A judicious selection from Franklin’s writings should constitute a part of the curriculum of every college and high school that aspires to cultivate in its pupils a pure style and correct literary taste.

  He was one of the best American prose writers of the century.

  Undoubtedly, his best work in letters was done after the year 1764, and thence forward down to the very year of his death; for, to a degree not only unusual but almost without parallel in literary history, his mind grew more and more vivacious with his advancing years, his heart more genial, his inventiveness more sprightly, his humor more gay, his style brighter, keener, more deft, more delightful. Yet even in these earlier writings of his, Franklin is always Franklin…. It is only by a continuous reading of the entire body of Franklin’s Revolutionary writings, from grave to gay, from lively to severe, that any one can know how brilliant was his wisdom, or how wise was his brilliance, or how humane and gentle and helpful were both. No one who, by such a reading, procures for himself such a pleasure and such a benefit, will be likely to miss the point of Sydney Smith’s playful menace to his daughter,—“I will disinherit you, if you do not admire everything written by Franklin.”

  The peculiar dryness especially characteristic of Yankee drollery is better illustrated from Franklin’s shrewd proverbs than from Irving’s spontaneous and sparkling descriptions.

  Franklin’s individualism ultimately found political application in the essential doctrines of that great party of which Jefferson is commonly called the founder. His influence for this reason has been, and to this day is, confounded with that of Jefferson and Voltaire. It differed from theirs in being more conservative. Its conservatism consisted in its sanity. His conception of government was one based on experience and “adapted to such a country as ours.”

  Franklin was indeed read, and exercised a good deal of influence, especially in his own city; and Franklin was a writer of no small literary abilities. Still, his popularity was due largely to his labors in behalf of his country, his interest in scientific matters, and the common-sense practicality of his maxims, which appealed to the shrewd commercial instincts of his countrymen.

  Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin are like enormous trees (say a pine and an oak), which may be seen from a great distance dominating the scrubby, homely, second growth of our provincial literature. They make an ill-assorted pair,—the cheery man of the world and the intense man of God—but they owe their preëminence to the same quality. Franklin, it is true, is remarkable for his unfailing common sense, a quality of which Edwards had not very much, his keenest sense being rather uncommon. But it was not his common sense, but the cause of his common sense, namely, his faculty of realization, that made Franklin eminent. This faculty is rare among men, but it was possessed by Franklin to a great degree. His perceptions of his surroundings—material, intellectual, personal, social, political—had power to affect his mind and action. He took real account of his circumstances.

  Almost every event of his life has been distorted until, from the great and accomplished man he really was, he has been magnified into an impossible prodigy. Almost everything he wrote about in science has been put down as a discovery. His wonderful ability in expressing himself has assisted in this; for if ten men wrote on a subject and Franklin was one of them, his statement is the one most likely to be preserved, because the others, being inferior in language, are soon forgotten and lost. Every scrap of paper he wrote upon is now considered a precious relic and a great deal of it is printed, so that statements which were but memoranda or merely his way of formulating other men’s knowledge for his own convenience or for the sake of writing a pleasant letter to a friend, are given undue importance. Indeed, when we read one of these letters or memoranda it is so clearly and beautifully expressed and put in such a captivating form that, as the editor craftily forbears to comment on it, we instinctively conclude that it must have been a gift of new knowledge to mankind.

  To judge Franklin from the literary standpoint is neither easy nor quite fair. It is not to be denied that as a philosopher, as a statesman, and as a friend, he owed much of his success to his ability as a writer. His letters charmed all, and made his correspondence eagerly sought. His political arguments were the joy of his party and the dread of his opponents. His scientific discoveries were explained in language at once so simple and so clear that plow-boy and exquisite could follow his thought or his experiment to its conclusion. Yet he was never a literary man in the true and common meaning of the term. Omitting his uncompleted autobiography and his scientific writings, there is hardly a line of his pen which was not privately or anonymously written, to exert a transient influence, fill an empty column, or please a friend. The larger part of his work was not only done in haste, but never revised or even proof-read. Yet this self-educated boy and busy, practical man gave to American literature the most popular autobiography ever written, a series of political and social satires that can bear comparison with those of the greatest satirists, a private correspondence as readable as Walpole’s or Chesterfield’s; and the collection of Poor Richard’s epigrams has been oftener printed and translated than any other production of an American pen.

  Franklin was the best letter-writer of his day in America. In comparison with Washington’s uniform epistolary style, Franklin’s is striking for its flexibility—dignified in weighty matters, in familiar letters, playful as a kitten, frequently witty and fanciful, pleasing always by clearness, naturalness and ease.