work to help his father in his business, that of a tallow-chandler and soap-boiler. Three years wore away in this humdrum life, when the boy became an apprentice" in the printing-house of his brother James. At that time the periodical press was just beginning to have a real existence. Addison's Spectator had been familiar in Boston for a few years, and when James Franklin started, 1721, his New England Courant, the second American newspaper, young Franklin was minded to try to write essays of the Addison-Steele order. While lacking any systematic education, he had always been an omnivorous reader; and though few books were then available, he had sensibly selected many standards of the day, and of the rich seventeenth century. That impalpable thing which we call style he had absorbed, at least in part; and his native good-sense soon removed him from merely imitative work. The "art of putting things" in written words was really introduced by Franklin to American readers. These vigorous and readable articles in the Courant were at first contributed by Franklin without his brother's knowledge; when the secret came out James did not bestow upon the earnest young scribbler the praise which had been expected; an estrangement deepened, and the most promising lad yet born in New England sold some of his few and precious books, and late in 1723, aged seventeen, betook himself to Philadelphia, of which he was to become the most distinguished citizen. Penniless and friendless, his trade stood him in good stead, and he found employment in the printing house of one Keimer, a Jew. "The printer," in those days, combined the functions of the modern publisher and editor, though the public usually learned when the printer-like Keimer-was not an intellectual force. Franklin, still a boy, soon came to have a little local renown as the brains of the Keimer establishment. So illustrious a personage, presumably, as was Sir William Keith, governor of Pennsylvania, "patronized" him, in the old-fashioned sense; and on the strength of Keith's untrustworthy promises to set him up in business, Franklin went to London in the winter of 1724-5, only to repeat his poverty-stricken Philadelphia experience. Typesetting supported him until the middle of 1726, when he returned to Philadelphia, with the promise of a clerkship, which, having got, he soon lost by the death of his employer. A year or two more with Keimer was followed by Franklin's instalment in an office of his own, his capitalist being a fellow-compositor named Meredith. This was in 1729; in the same year he bought of Keimer The Pennsylvania Gazette, a paper established to forestall a journalistic scheme of Franklin's, and boasting at the time of its purchase a subscription-list of ninety names. Franklin's Boston editorial knack was applied to the Philadelphia situation, and, indeed, to subjects of general colonial interest; and by it The Pennsylvania Gazette first made Franklin a man of note. Neither Boston nor New York could boast, at that time, a journal really rivalling this able periodical. In its columns Franklin made his mind felt as a force in many ways; and at this time, sensibly, he was remedying, by constant study of several languages, the defects of his early education. a man of letters. At this period of Franklin's life it was almost as Franklin as evident as it is now that he was to be a man of affairs as truly as a scholar; and that he was not to seek or to win a distinctly literary reputation. Literature for its own sake was not to be cultivated in America until more than half a century later. New England ministers had written to further the theological cause; politicians in New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and the South were soon to write that they might promote great political reforms; Franklin had already begun his voluminous and miscellaneous contributions to printed matter, but not as an author. His "works" fill a goodly row of octavos, but how miscellaneous is their character! Adams, in Boston, was ever writing to the papers in order to help his political work; Franklin wrote as a journalist, a social moralist, an early scientist, a politician, or a diplomatist, for ends implied in these words. His longest writing was his "Autobiography," and thus he showed the correctness of his own estimate of himself. That estimate was that the man Franklin stood behind all his words and deeds, and that his written and printed words, in particular, were parts of a personality, not an artistic product or series of products. The same statement applies to his few orations. The work of the newspaper writer, the man of scientific pursuits, the statesman, the orator, or even the almanacmaker, may approach literature, and may become a part of literature; but the aims and attainments of the working force, within or without literature, and of the man of letters, are not to be subjected to the same standards. It would be easy to make long quotations from Franklin's Addisonian Essays, and to show from them that he possessed a pleasant style, a due share of wit, a helpful purpose to reform Philadelphia foibles and follies, a well-read mind, a touch of pathos, and some other qualities deemed necessary to equip a member of The Spectator's school. But nearly all of the great body of imitators of Steele and Addison are now unread, and their amiable lucubrations are forgotten. If Doctor Johnson as essayist is neglected by his nineteenth-century readers, while Doctor Johnson the man is one of the best-known figures in English literary history, Doctor Franklin need not complain if he has met a similar fate. Indeed, the parallel is somewhat close, though Johnson considered himself one of the first authors, as well as first forces, of his time, while Franklin was much more modest. 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: * Such, for instance, as those entitled The Busy-Body, contributed by him to The Weekly Mercury, 1729, published in Philadelphia by Andrew Bradford-a rival of Keimer. 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. Richard's The almanac, however popular and however in"Poor dispensable, is not usually considered the Almanac." highest or most permanent form of literature. It was the achievement of Benjamin Franklin to give to his series of "Poor Richard's Almanac" (begun in 1733) a reputation both national and lasting; and to make it, actually, a means of social education. "Wise saws and modern instances" still form an indispensable part of the almanac, and Franklin showed a knack in making proverbs that not only put his rivals out of sight, but, so far as they went, showed him to be worthy of mention beside his transatlantic contemporary, Alexander Pope. As an almanacseer, Franklin was neither a pioneer nor a creator; he adapted freely, but he used, by original and quoted words, a medium of popular instruction as it had not been used before. Benjamin Franklin, printer, as "Richard Saunders, Philomath," for a quarter of a century provided the people with saws, proverbs, and bits of homely advice which were conned and repeated by thousands, and so effectively taught principles of common-sense, economy, and prudence that they actually increased Philadelphia's stock of ready money, and helped to make its vicinity the home of frugality and "forehandedness." Ten thousand copies made a great circulation for those days; and the pamphlets were worn to pieces by their eager owners. |