PREFACE.

THE memoirs of his own life, which Dr. Franklin began but never finished, terminated with his arrival. in England, in 1757, as agent of the Colony of Pennsylvania. He was then fifty-one years of age, and just entering upon that part of his public career in which his marvellous talents appear to the greatest advantage. From this time until 1785 he resided abroad, as agent of the colonies or as minister plenipotentiary of the United States; his two brief visits to his native land, in 1762 and in 1775, scarcely constituting an interruption of his protracted foreign service.

During this long period of twenty-eight years, he was, of course, in constant correspondence, officially, with the governments he represented, and unofficially with prominent public men, and with his family and friends, both at home and abroad.

During the five years that elapsed between his final return from Europe, in 1785, and his death, he naturally maintained an active correspondence with his numerous

friends in the Old World, among whom he had spent the most useful and perhaps the happiest years of his life.

To this protracted expatriation we owe the fact that there is scarcely an important incident of Franklin's life which is not described by himself in his memoirs, or in his correspondence; and it is to this vast treasury of sterling English, which seems to have been almost miraculously preserved from incalculable perils by sea and by land, that the legion of his biographers have been indebted for whatever has most contributed to render their works attractive.

I am not aware that any other eminent man has left so complete a record of his own life. The part of it which, from the nature of things, could not be preserved in correspondence-his youth and early manhood; his years of discipline and preparation—has been made as familiar as household words to at least three generations, in those imperishable pages which, in the full maturity of his faculties and experience, he prepared at the special instance of his friends Le Veillard, Rochefoucault, and Vaughan. From the period when that fragment closes until his death, we have a continuous, I might almost say daily record of his life, his labors, his anxieties, and his triumphs, from his own pen, and written when all the incidents and emotions they awakened were most fresh and distinct in his mind.

If I may judge by the unexampled popularity and influence of his memoirs of the early part of his life, I am not mistaken in supposing that the world will be more interested in reading his own account of those more eventful years which followed, than in what any other person has said or can say about them. However we may prize the judgments of discriminating biographers of Franklin, their interest must always be subordinate to that which we feel in his own; and the pleasure, be it never so great, which we experience in reading other versions of the incidents of his varied and picturesque career only increases our curiosity to read the account which he gave of them at the time, to his government and friends, in his own pure, limpid, and sparkling English.

It is under the impulse of such convictions that the work which is now submitted to the public has been prepared. I have aimed to condense Franklin's own memorials of his entire life, hitherto scattered through many bulky volumes and yet more bulky manuscript collections, into a single compact work, and to give them the convenient order and attractiveness of a continuous narrative. To this end I have taken from his writings and correspondence whatever was autobiographical, and presented it in a strictly chronological order. I have not attempted to give all his letters, nor more of any letter or other document than furthered the central and controlling purpose of the work,-to

tell the Franklin story fully and without tediousness or

vain repetitions.

Like all the modern biographers of Franklin, I have depended mainly upon the precious collection of his writings and correspondence, published by Mr. Sparks in 1836-1840. I was fortunate enough, a few years since, to obtain some valuable details of his later days, in a collection of his letters addressed to M. Le Veillard, an account of which, and of the original manuscript from which the autobiography, down to 1757, was printed,* will be found in the history which immediately follows of the "fortunes and misfortunes" of that unique autograph.

Franklin's narrative, as I have arranged it, is at once so full and consecutive that there has been small occasion for editorial interference; but whenever an allusion is made that might not be intelligible to the general reader, or a stitch is dropped in the web of the narrative, I have endeavoured to supply what was lacking in foot-notes, leaving the Franklin text entirely unbroken-a continuous diary-up to the later stages of his last illness.

To the obvious objection that the material for this biography was already mostly in print, I answer that the like objection might be made with equal propriety

This manuscript was first printed in 1868. See "Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, edited from his Manuscript, with Notes and an Introduction, by John Bigelow." Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1868.

to quite the best biography of Franklin which has yet appeared. I refer, of course, to Mr. Parton's.

In the second place, the collection of Franklin's writings by Mr. Sparks has been many years out of print, and has become the exclusive property of the few who have the taste and the ability to own very rare and costly books.

In the third place, that work was always too voluminous and expensive for popular circulation. There probably were never more than five thousand copies printed, if so many; which were absorbed more than thirty years ago. It is quite safe to say that, of the forty millions of the present generation of Americans, not one in a thousand has ever opened a copy of the Sparks collection.

And, finally, the autobiographical portions of Franklin's writings are scattered through ten bulky volumes, to be mastered only by a perusal of the whole. It is unnecessary to say that, in these days of abundant if inferior reading, very few of those who are fortunate enough to possess these volumes have the leisure, or perhaps the inclination, to purchase a familiarity with Franklin's life at so high a price. Hence it happens that the bulk of Franklin's letters, which constitute as fine a body of English prose as was produced in the last century, is as if it had never been printed, to more than ninety per cent. of the present generation of his countrymen, not to speak of the reading world beyond