Opening of the book
Likeness with autograph
ECLECTIC ENGLISH CLASSICS
FRANKLIN'S
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
EDITED BY
O. LEON REID
HEAD OF ENGLISH DEPARTMENT, LOUISVILLE MALE
HIGH SCHOOL, LOUISVILLE, KY.
NEW YORK · CINCINNATI · CHICAGO
AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY
Copyright, 1896 and 1910, by
American Book Company
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
W. P. 12
INTRODUCTION.
When Franklin was born, in 1706, Queen Anne was on the
English throne, and Swift and Defoe were pamphleteering.
The one had not yet written "Gulliver's Travels," nor the other "Robinson Crusoe;" neither had Addison and Steele and other wits of Anne's reign begun the "Spectator." Pope was eighteen years old.
At that time ships bringing news, food and raiment, and laws and governors to the ten colonies of America, ran grave chances of falling into the hands of the pirates who infested the waters of the shores. In Boston Cotton Mather was persecuting witches. There were no stage coaches in the land,—merely a bridle path led from New York to
Philadelphia,—and a printing press throughout the colonies was a raree-show.
Only six years before Franklin's birth, the first
newspaper report for the first newspaper in the country was written on the death of Captain Kidd and six of his companions near Boston, when the editor of the "NewsLetter" told the story of the hanging of the pirates, detailing the exhortations and prayers and their takingoff. Franklin links us to another world of action.
His boyhood in Boston was a stern beginning of the habit of hard work and rigid economy which marked the man. For a year he went to the Latin Grammar School on School Street, but left off at the age of ten to help his father in making soap and candles. He persisted in showing such
"bookish inclination," however, that at twelve his father apprenticed him to learn the printer's trade. At seventeen he ran off to Philadelphia and there began his independent career.
In the main he led such a life as the maxims of "Poor
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