writing of this kind than that of the younger Franklin. There was one oasis, however, in this desert of disputatious divinity and that was the immortal work of Plutarch, which George Eliot so finely described as the "pasturage of noble minds." From this rich soil of human experience and achievement Franklin drew impulse and instruction in equal degree; and the reading of the Lives left a permanent impression on his character. In his simplicity, frankness, courage, and industry he was one of Plutarch's men. A book of De Foe's fell into his hands at this time and was probably not without influence on his style.

His tastes and the direction given to his thoughts by his passion for books inclined him to the printer's trade; although the siren voice of the sea had not yet ceased to sing to him. At the age of twelve he was bound to his older brother James by indentures which made him an apprentice until he was twenty-one years old. He learned his craft easily and rapidly and, having freer access to books, often sat up all night in order to return a borrowed volume in the morning. He was securing that education without which success in the higher fields of activity is impossible. Although essentially a man of understanding rather than of imagination, Franklin did not escape the charms of verse. He even succumbed to the temptation to turn the musical line, and a ballad of his making, dealing after the manner of ballads of the time with a drowning accident, had a great sale; and the flattered writer would have ventured upon larger enterprises of the kind if his brother had not assured him that verse-writers were generally beggars. Escaping this peril Franklin devoted himself to prose, writing with an instinctive conviction that the ability to use the pen with freedom and power was to be of great importance to him. Several letters of his, written to an acquaintance in the progress of a discussion between them, fell into his father's hands; and the elder Franklin, who was a man of great natural sagacity, made Benjamin conscious of the lack of clearness, orderliness,

and eloquence in his style and awakened the critical sense in the boy's mind.

As a rule, men of original power are fortunate in falling at the ripe moment on the material essential to their own liberation and growth; Franklin happily came upon a volume of the Spectator at this critical time in his education. He could hardly have found a better model, nor one which could deflect him less from his own line of growth or teach him more of the things he needed to know. His native gift of clear, large, tolerant, understanding; his controlling sense of reality; his resolute common-sense; his immense capacity for learning the ways of the world and the character of men found in the lucidity, humor, ease, and sincerity of the Spectator both example and impulse. The boy suddenly found himself, for the purposes of his own development as a prose-writer, under the wise, urbane, and captivating teaching of one of the masters of English writing.

His use of the Spectator was so characteristic and of such great importance in his education as a writer that his own account of it must not be abridged :

"I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With this view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try'd to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults and corrected them. But I found I wanted a stock of words, or a readiness in recollecting or using them, which I thought I should have acquired before that time if I had gone on making verses; since the continual occasion for words of the same import, but of different length, to suit the measure, or of different sound for the rhyme, would have laid me under a constant necessity of searching for variety, and also have tended to fix that variety in my mind, and make me master of it. Therefore I took some of the tales and turned them into verse; and, after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back again. I also

sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeavored to reduce them into the best order, before I began to form the full sentences and compleat the paper. This was to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts. By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovered many faults and amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language, and this encouraged me to think I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer, of which I was extremely ambitious. My time for these exercises and for reading was at night, after work or before it began in the morning, or on Sundays, when I contrived to be in the printing-house alone, evading as much as I could the common attendance on public worship which my father used to exact of me when I was under his care, and which indeed I still thought a duty, though I could not as it seemed to me, afford time to practise it."

In his way Franklin studied the resources and qualities of English prose as thoroughly as did Robert Louis Stevenson. Awakened to the need of education, and with a dim prophetic sense of his future work, he did not content himself with books of literature and exercises in writing; he mastered arithmetic, studied navigation and geometry, read Locke's On the Human Understanding, devoured Xenophon's Memorabilia, and promptly adopted the Socratic method of discussion; came under the influence of Anthony Collins and Lord Shaftesbury, and became "a real doubter in many points of our religious doctrine." The printer's apprentice was fast emancipating himself, not only from the narrowness of his personal conditions, but from the provincialism of the little colonial world in which his lot was cast. Without formal education, means, friends, or travel, he had brought himself into touch with the finest English literary influence of an age of notable urbanity and elegance, and into sympathy with a view of religion radical even in the England of Queen Anne, and antipodal to the Puritan teaching in his native city.

At the age of fifteen Franklin was writing for the New Eng land Courant, which his brother had launched upon the untried sea of journalism. It had had three predecessors in the new world the Boston News-Letter, the Boston Gazette, and the American Weekly Mercury, published in Philadelphia. Several of James Franklin's friends endeavored to dissuade him from the enterprise, on the ground that one newspaper was enough for America! The younger brother, doubtful of the value of his work, thrust an anonymous paper under the door of the counting-room, and had the pleasure of hearing it warmly commended, and its authorship credited to men of learning and ability in the community. Two years later, having run away from Boston on account of his brother's violent temper, Franklin reached Philadelphia with a dollar and a shilling in his pocket. It was on a Sunday morning in October, 1723. Franklin found employment as a printer; made a few friends; went to London on a fool's errand; walked the streets of the great city in search of work, and finally found it in a large printinghouse; fell into evil company, and became as licentious and wasteful as his companions; wrote a pamphlet to prove that there is no ground for believing in a future life, or in religion, which brought him to the notice of a group of sceptics. At twenty he was back in Philadelphia keeping books, setting type, and mending presses. "It was at this time," writes Professor MacMaster, "that Benjamin founded the Junto, wrote his famous epitaph, grew religious, composed a liturgy for his own use, and became the father of an illegitimate son."

IL 1729 he became the proprietor of the Pennsylvania Gazette. He had written on various subjects, and one pamphlet on paper money had attracted wide attention. He had also,

reviving his love of the Spectator, begun a series of essays in which he endeavored to teach without being didactic, to moralize without being dogmatic, and to satirize without malice or bitterness.

The Busybody Papers had prepared the

way for the easy handling of such subjects as How to Pleass in Conversation, The Meditations on a Quart Mug, On Lying Tradesmen, On the Waste of Life, On True Happiness. Franklin never caught the Addisonian tone - its urbanity, old-world ease and refinement; but he was full of good sense, sagacious observations, effective if somewhat broad humor, and ready sense of journalistic interest. The practical side of his nature was tireless in the effort to introduce better methods in domestic and municipal life; indeed, in the application of practical ideas to life, Franklin is one of the foremost men in history; he was never content until he had substituted intelligence for habit or custom. The police and fire departments, then in the most rudimentary stages, were systematized or reformed at his suggestion; he was instrumental in organizing the first militia, and in cleaning and lighting the streets. He founded the Philadelphia Library, which has been called "the mother of all the North American subscription libraries"; he was largely instrumental in founding the Academy and Charitable School of the Province of Pennsylvania, which subsequently became the Philadelphia College, and has now become the University of Pennsylvania.

Poor Richard's Almanac, which brought him fame and fortune, was begun in 1732 and appeared annually for a quarter of a century. Almanacs were in every household and, in remote parts of the country, furnished the only reading matter. Professor MacMaster tells us that they were the journals and account books of the poor. "Strung upon a stick and hung beside the chimney place, they formed an unbroken record of domestic affairs, in many instances for thirty years. On the margins of one since picked up at a paper mill are recorded the interesting cases of a physician's practice, and the names of those who suffered with small pox and flux.' They were sold for a sixpence, and when the sixpence was not forthcoming they were exchanged for produce, rum, stockings