TRANSFERRED TO HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY,

EDITOR'S NOTE

THE Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is valuable chiefly because it is the veracious record of the life of a self-made man who by his own effort became both learned and great. The English in which it is written is not altogether correct; while the style has wonderful perspicuity and charm, it by no means offers a model for imitation. The real subject of interest is the man who stands forth by his own revelation in the plain, unvarnished, but complaisant narrative of his deeds. The beginning was in an ordinary boyhood, in the colonial epoch, when almost all must earn their own livelihood. For many years, each phase of his life was the replica of scores of others, his contemporaries. The distinguishing characteristics of the man were discerned only when he had become great and exceptional in the esteem of the world. Then, it was apparent that a singular uniformity of aim and method had characterized him from the beginning of his career, so that each period of his activity had prepared him for the next. He passed from small affairs to great as naturally and inevitably as if, from the first, he had foreseen what was to come and had shaped his course with it in view. Nor did he ever attain an eminence which it was beyond his natural qualities to sustain. To the very end of his life, the gravest responsibilities rested upon him; the affairs intrusted to his management required the nicest judgment, the most unvarying patience and good humor, the greatest tact and skill in dealing with men ; but in all he was unfailing, and so difficult was it to find among younger men one able to fill his place at the court of France, that the old man, in failing health, was obliged to remain more than two years after the signing of the treaties.

Finally, when he was old, recognizing how typical had been

his situation, how common the means of his rise to greatness, he had the generosity and the ingenuous courage to write an account of his early life which included a confession of his follies and mistakes, and of the pains the effort to remedy them cost him. Thus, the Autobiography, penned with the view of instructing and aiding the young in like situation, is not the least important of the many services rendered by Benjamin Franklin in his long life. It remains, with the institutions he founded, and the national independence he aided in establishing, a benefit to posterity.

In this edition of the Autobiography, it is thought best to make no attempt to present a complete history of Franklin's life. His own writing carries the narrative forward through his active and formative years, as ordinarily reckoned, then breaks off just when he began to be absorbed in affairs of public importance, to which he gave a longer time than all the years he had spent in his own business. This later period of Franklin's life belongs, as it were, to the public, and the story of the services he rendered is told in history, where every schoolboy reads of him.

But this is not all. Franklin was more versatile than any other man of his generation. He was, indeed, a diplomatist and a statesman, but he was also a great scientist, a discoverer, an inventor, an author whose writings, after more than a century, are still read for their own sake. When Poor Richard no longer wrote to instruct or amuse his fellow countrymen, he found occasion for his ready wit in pieces designed to set in a satiric light his political enemies; or, in more gentle humor, he wrote pleasing short pieces, "bagatelles," to suit the humor of the day and pass an idle hour, but, nevertheless, full of meaning. In the selection of a few of these writings of Franklin for this edition, we have sought to give such as are illustrative of his wit, his humor, his gift of suggesting, in the form of pleasing discourse, some pregnant idea, or bit of satire, or moral truth.

Of the literary quality of these writings, and of the autobiography, it is enough to say that they fulfill, in a remarkable degree, his own requirement of excellence in composition.

"How shall we judge of the goodness of a writing?" he asked. “Or what qualities should a writing have to be good and perfect of its kind?

"Answer. To be good it ought to have a tendency to benefit the reader, by improving his virtue or his knowledge. But, not regarding the intention of the author, the method should be just; that is, it should proceed regularly from things known to things unknown, distinctly and clearly, without confusion. The words used should be the most expressive that the language affords, provided that they are the most generally understood. Nothing should be expressed in two words that can be as well expressed in one; that is, no synonyms should be used, or very rarely, but the whole should be as short as possible consistent with clearness; the words should be so placed as to be agreeable to the ear in reading; summarily, it should be smooth, clear, and short, for the contrary qualities are displeasing."

Both Irving and Franklin learned to write prose by study and imitation of the same authors The Spectator papers, Addison, Bunyan, Defoe; but the result in diction and style differed as widely as the temperaments of the men. Irving, endowed with æsthetic and literary perception, assimilated these qualities, in the study of his masters in literary art. The reading of his essays impresses on the mind the meanings of words derived from classic languages, and makes the young writer familiar with the intricate forms of sentence structure borrowed from their literatures. But Franklin, from the same models, learned how to arrange his thought in an orderly manner, how to condense his meaning, and to proceed from each thought to the next. His mind instinctively shunned complicated forms borrowed from languages with which he was not familiar, but found a nat

ural and easy mode of expression in the clear, direct, brief style characteristic of Bunyan or Defoe. Thus, familiarity with the writings of Franklin fills the mind with store of homely but expressive words, and the terse, rich phrases of our English idiom.

A word should be said here about aims and methods of instruction in the use of this text. The reading of a good autobiography is like tracing the pattern of another person's life; no reading is more useful or instructive, but, unfortunately, this sort of narrative requires the illumination of parallel experience for full appreciation. Young readers quickly pass the limit of their own age and lack the imagination necessary for pleasure, or for the understanding of experience beyond their years. In a degree, the Autobiography is an exception to this rule. It is one of the few lives of great men containing a clear and definite thread of narrative interesting alike to young and old. It also presents an illustration, in a single instance, of conditions of life already familiar through stories of colonial history. Moreover, the homely advice and the proverbs of Poor Richard, sown broadcast on the leaves of ten thousand Almanacs a year, have been the seed from which the familiar sayings of daily life in this country have sprung. And so, the reading of the Autobiography may become the means of uniting in one pleasant conception many parts of familiar knowledge. In order to gain this result, the instructor, from his wider and fuller knowledge, and from deeper understanding, must direct the topics for study to definite ends. These may be summarized briefly :

1. The life of Franklin should appear as an historical life ; that is, he should clearly seem to belong to a time, and to have lived under conditions that have now passed away. By close correlation with other reading or study, a historical background may be created having the characteristics of the eighteenth century, and of life in a new country.