that he recognized those broad and eternal truths which lie at the basis of all religion. He seems to have profoundly felt his responsibleness to a higher than earthly power; everywhere he beheld a wise and beneficent Creator, in the operation of material and moral laws; always he sought the traces of Divine wisdom in the universe and in events. We find him advising his daughter to rely more upon prayer than sermons; recognizing the hand of Providence in the destinies of his country; moving a resolution for devotional services in the convention that framed the constitution; preparing an abridgment of the ritual; and, in his last days, enjoying those devotional poems which have so long endeared the name of Watts. It is not so much the comparative silence of Franklin on religious or rather sectarian questions, which has given rise to a vague notion of his scepticism and indifference, as the fact that he acknowledged deistical opinions in youth, and subsequently worked almost exclusively in the sphere of material interests, and was intimately associated with the infidel philosophers of France. Other affinities than those of speculative unbelief, however, allied him to a class of men whose names have become watchwords of infidelity; literature and science, government and philosophy, were themes of mutual investigation common to them and him; and if, in order to attest their sense of his intelligence and republicanism, they placed his bust upon the altar of the Jacobin Club with those of Brutus, Helvetius, Mirabeau, and Rousseau, it was chiefly because, with those friends of popular freedom and social reform, he had proved himself an independent thinker and a noble devotee of human progress, and because, to the vague though eloquent sentiment of social amelioration kindled by Jean Jacques, his practical sagacity had given actual embodiment. Few men, indeed, have lived whose time, mind, and resources were more wisely and conscientiously directed to the elevation of society, the enlightenment of the mass, and the improvement of human condition. He was indisputably one of the greatest benefactors of mankind.

Except in a scientific direction, however, it must be acknowledged that the spirit of Franklin's precepts and theories is not adapted to beguile us "along the line of infinite desires;" his wisdom was applicable to the immediate and the essential in daily

and common life; he dealt chiefly with details; he advocated habits, ideas, and methods, based on positive utility; success as derived from patient and gradual but determined action, minute observation, careful practice, rather than from broad generalization, daring achievement, or the imagination and enthusiasm which so often prove intuitive means of triumph, which are indispensable in art, and constitute the difference between the process of genius and that of talent. There is nothing certain, he used to say, but death and taxes; happiness he believed the aggregate of small satisfactions, rather than the instant realization of a great hope; and fortune he regarded as the reward of assiduity and prudence, rather than of prosperous adventure or of daring enterprise. Compared with the ephemeral impulses, the obscure theories, the visionary and uncertain principles, in vogue elsewhere and before and since his day, there was incalculable value in his maxims and example. But it would be gross injustice to the versatile and comprehensive nature of man, to the aspirations of exalted minds, to the facts of spiritual philosophy, to the needs of immortal instincts, to the faith of the soul, the annals of genius, and the possible elevation of society, to admit that such views are more than the material basis of human progress, or the external conditions of individual development. What the ballast is to the ship, the trellis to the vine, health of body to activity of mind, such was Franklin's social philosophy to human welfare; all-important as a means, inadequate as a final provision; a method of insuring the coöperation of natural aids, of fostering intrinsic resources, whereby the higher elements may freely do their work, and man, sustained by favorable circumstances, and unhampered by want, neglect, and improvidence, may the more certainly enjoy, aspire, love, conceive, expand, and labor, according to the noblest inspiration and the grandest scope of his nature and his destiny.

If we compare the life of Franklin, as a whole, with that of other renowned philosophers, we find that the isolated self-devotion, the egotism and vanity, which too often derogate from the interest and dignity of their characters as men, do not mar the unity of the tranquil, honest, and benign disposition, which lends a gracious charm to the American philosopher. Archimedes invented warlike machines to overthrow the invaders of his coun

try; but his heart did not warm like Franklin's, nor did his brain work to devise the means of elevating his poor and ignorant fellow-citizens in the scale of knowledge and self-government. Newton proclaimed vast and universal laws; but there was in his temper a morbid tenacity of personal fame, beside which the disinterested zeal of Franklin is beautiful. The scope of Franklin's research was limited in comparison with that of Humboldt; but unsustained, like that noble savant, by royal patronage, he sacrificed his love of science for half his lifetime to the cause of his country. Arago excelled him in the power of rhetorical eulogy of the votaries of their common pursuits; but while the French philosopher spoke eloquently to a learned academy, the American had a people for his audience, and disseminated among them truths vital to their progress and happiness, in a diction so clear, direct, and convincing, that it won them simultaneously to the love of science and the practice of wisdom.

When he was released from official care, his mental activity, though unremitted, was singularly genial; and to this characteristic of the philosophical temperament we attribute his self-possession, rational enjoyment, and consequent longevity; for, of all pursuits, that which has for its aim general knowledge and the discovery and application of truth, while it raises the mind above casual disturbance, supplies it with an object at once unimpassioned and attractive, serene yet absorbing, a motive in social intercourse, and a resource in seclusion. Just before Thierry's recent death, although he was long a martyr to disease, he remarked to a friend: "Had I to begin my life again, I would again set out in the path which has led me to where I am. Blind and suffering, without hope and without intermission, I may say, without giving testimony which can be suspected, there is something in this world better than material pleasure, better than fortune, better than health itself, and this is attachment to science." Of this good Franklin was a large partaker, and we cannot but imagine the delight and sympathy with which he would have followed the miraculous progress of the modern sciences, and of those ideas of which he beheld but the dawn. "I have sometimes almost wished," he writes, "it had been my destiny to be born two or three centuries hence; for inventions

up

and improvements are prolific, and beget more of their kind." Had he lived a little more than another fifty years, he would have seen the mode of popular education initiated by the Spectator expanded into the elaborate Review, the brilliant Magazine, the Household Words, and scientific journals of the present day; the rude hand-press, upon which he arranged the miniature" copy" of the New England Courant, transformed into electrotyped cylinders worked by steam and throwing off thirty thousand printed sheets an hour; the thin almanac, with its proverbs and calendar, grown to a plethoric volume, rich in astronomical lore and the statistics of a continent; the vessel dependent on the caprice of the winds and an imperfect science of navigation, selfimpelled with a pre-calculated rate of speed, and by the most authentic charts; and the subtle fluid, that his prescience caught and directed safely by a metal rod, sent along leagues of wire the silent and instant messenger of the world! With what keen interest would he have followed Davy, with his safety-lamp, into the treacherous mine; accompanied Fulton in his first steam voyage up the Hudson; watched Daguerre as he made his sunpictures; seen the vineyards along the Ohio attest his prophetic advocacy of the Rhenish grape-culture; heard Miller discourse of the "Old Red Sandstone," Morse explain the Telegraph, or Maury the tidal laws! Chemistry, almost born since his day, would open a new and wonderful realm to his consciousness; the Cosmos of Humboldt would draw his entranced gaze down every vista of natural science, as if to reveal at a glance a programme of all the great and beautiful secrets of the universe; and the reckless enterprise and mad extravagance of his prosperous country would elicit more emphatic warnings than Poor Richard breathed of old.

There have been many writers who, in simple and forcible English, by arguments drawn from pure common sense and enlivened by wit or eloquence, interpreted political truth, and vastly aided the education of the people. But, in the case of Franklin, this practical service of authorship was immeasurably extended and confirmed by the prestige of his electrical discoveries, by the dawning greatness and original principles of the country of which he was so prominent a representative, and by the extraor

dinary circumstances of his times, when great social and political questions were brought to new and popular tests, which made the homely scientific republican an oracle in the most luxurious and artificial of despotic courts. When the intricate tactics of rival armies have been exhausted, the able general has recourse to a coup de main, and effects by simple bravery what stratagem failed to win. When a question has been discussed until its primary significance is almost forgotten in a multitude of side-issues, the true orator suddenly brings to a focus the scattered elements of the theme, and, by a clear and emphatic statement, reproduces its normal features, and, through a bold analysis, places it in the open light of truth, and heralds the bewildered council to a final decision. In like manner, when vital principles of government and society have been complicated by interest, speculation, and misfortune, when men have grown impatient of formulas and ceremonies, and aspire to realities, he who in his speech, dress, habits, writings, manners, and achievements, or, in the exponent of all these, his character, -represents most truly the normal instincts, average common sense, and practicable good, of his race, is welcomed as an exemplar, an authority, and a representative. Such was the American philosopher at once in the eyes of a newly-organized and self-dependent nation, and in those of an ancient people, in its transition from an outgrown to an experimental regime.

He took his degree in the school of humanity before the technical honor was awarded by Oxford, Edinburgh, and the Royal Society. It was this preeminent distinction which led Sydney Smith to playfully threaten his daughter, "I will disinherit you if you do not admire everything written by Franklin;" and which enshrines his memory in the popular heart, makes him still the annual hero of the printer's festival, associates his name with townships and counties, inns and ships, societies and periodicals, — with all the arrangements and objects of civilization that aim to promote the enlightenment and convenience of man. The press and the lightning-rod, the almanac, the postage-stamp, and the free-school medal, attest his usefulness and renown; maxims

*"I was born in Boston, in New England," - this is the simple language of his will," and owe my first instructions in literature to the free grammar