to their discipline, and upon finding the convent strongly fortified and garrisoned, they forthwith abandoned the enterprise, and returned in confusion and dismay to Moscow. A movement in that city by the Narishkin party, vigorously seconded by the boy-prince and his trained retainers, ensued, and the not long delayed result was, the enforced retirement of the Princess Sophia to a nunnery; the banishment of Gallitzin, with the magnificent pension of three copecks (half-pence) per diem; and the installation of Peter the First (Oct. 4th, 1689), as Czar of all the Russias.

As might, under favouring circumstances, have been expected, the iron-willed, self-reliant, practically-inclined, clear-headed boy, nurtured amidst violence, and in constant peril from the machinations of fierce and implacable enemies, dilated and hardened as the years passed on, into the imperious, indefatigable, keen-visioned, ruthless benefactor and despot of the country he ruled, scourged, and reformed.

HERE are few lives more pleasant to contemplate than that of Benjamin Franklin, chiefly, no doubt, that it presents no very abrupt and startling effects, and that ordinary mortals, who look to the biographies of eminent men for practical lessons in the philosophy which teaches by individual examples, are not dismayed quite as much as they are dazzled by discovering that the success of the hero of the narrative has mainly resulted from the display of a marvellous intellectual power, possessed by a very slight per-centage of mankind, or an extraordinary conjunction of favouring circumstances which none but fools will calculate upon meeting with in their own experience. A journeyman printer, the son of humble parents, endowed with no more of what is understood by the term genius than falls to the lot of thousands of men who live and die in obscurity, is seen to attain a good position in business, an eminent one in political society, and a highly respectable name in science and literature, by the aid alone of strong, clear common sense, combined with integrity, temperance, and persevering industry. It is quite true that but for the American Revolution Dr. Franklin would not have been the ambassador of the United States at the Court of France; but his enduring reputation does not rest upon his achievements as a politician,-and there can be little question that his worldly position, in a substantial sense, would have been improved,-his rank, as a man of science, a much higher one, and that he might, perhaps, have won for himself a bright and lasting wreath in the fields of literature in place of the few stray and perishing blossoms which he had leisure to gather there, had not imperious circumstances compelled him to involve himself in the stormy struggles of political warfare. Hence it is that the example of Franklin is of wider application, of more practical efficacy, than the history of more brilliant heroes of biography affords, and

certainly in no part of that life-lesson is the moral which it points more clearly indicated than in its earlier chapters.

Benjamin Franklin, the youngest son and youngest child save two of a family of seventeen children, thirteen of whom grew up to man and womanhood, was born on the 6th of January, 1706, at Boston, New England, whither his father, Josiah Franklin, had emigrated with his first wife and three children, from Northamptonshire, in 1685. Benjamin's mother, espoused in second nuptials by his father, was Abiah Folger, daughter of Peter Folger, one of the earlier settlers in New England, and, according to the testimony of the Reverend Cotton Mather, "a godly and learned Englishman," who had rendered himself obnoxious to the ruling powers in the colony by his denunciations, with both tongue and pen, of their cruel intolerance towards dissidents from their own mode of faith and worship. As a matter of course, he was branded as a slanderous libeller, an imputation which he took in great dudgeon, and replied to in some verses which show that if, as Dr. Franklin remarks, his own passionate abhorrence of persecution was inherited from his maternal grandfather, the rhyming faculty with which he was gifted must have been derived from some other source:

"Because to be a libeller,

I hate it with my heart,

From Sherborne town, where now I dwell,

My name I do put here;

Without offence, your real friend,

It is Peter Folger."

Franklin traces, not without some degree of pride, his ancestry on his father's side to the time when the name was that of a numerous and independent class of English yeomanry. It was retained as a personal patronyme, with thirty freehold acres near Ecton, Northamptonshire, which had remained, probably, in the family for 300 years, when a female cousin of the doctor's, who married one Fisher, sold the estate to a Mr. Isted. Before, however, this occurred, the father of Benjamin Franklin was settled, and moderately prospering in Boston, as a chandler and soapboiler; the business of dyeing, which he commenced with, not then succeeding well in America. He was a fairly-educated and naturally shrewd intelligent man; could draw prettily, and play with some skill on the violin; and withal, it would seem, was somewhat of a humorist. It was his expressed intention to devote Benjamin as a propitiatory tithe-offering to the service of the Church; with which view he kept the boy at a grammar-school till he was eight years old, and encouraged his uncle and godfather, Benjamin-a worthy man, who had concocted two large quarto volumes of manuscript poetry, which, but for the stolid inappreciation of English and American publishers, would have delighted mankind-to devote his literary talents to the preparation of a large number of sermons, so that his nephew and godchild might start in his clerical career with a good stock of ready-made eloquence and sound divinity. Suddenly discovering, however, that the cost of a college education for his son was much beyond his means, Mr. Josiah Franklin transferred Benjamin to a common school, kept by a Mr. Brownwell,

and soon after he was ten years old enlisted his services in the soapboiling business; an occupation which the boy greatly disliked, partly from his strong predilection for the life of a sailor-long before embraced by one of his elder brothers-which ever presents itself in an enticing if delusive aspect to the bold-spirited younkers of a seaport town, with its exciting panorama of ships sailing away with favouring winds, and returning richly laden with the produce of far-off mysterious lands beyond the sea. The lad had already self-qualified himself, to some extent, for the profession which had taken such strong hold of his imagination, by learning to swim well and confidently, and exercising himself in boat management. But fate and his father proved adverse to his wishes, and it was determined he should be a landsman and a mechanic, though in what particular branch of handicraft was for some time undecided. His cousin, Samuel, son of Uncle Ben, who had commenced business as a cutler, demanded an apprentice fee of such unkinsmanlike magnitude that the intention of binding him to that business was necessarily abandoned, and a possibility of being permitted to fight the battle of life amongst the whales of the Arctic seas again loomed doubtfully in the distance. His education, meanwhile, though he was no longer at school, progressed favourably. The very common boy-propensity to devour books was, in his case, accompanied by a much rarer craving to digest and thoroughly master what he read; and there is one part of the boy's home nurture which demands especial notice, on account of the paramount influence it exercised over his subsequent fortunes. A cultivated sensitive palate was about the worst accomplishment, in his father's opinion, which persons having to push their own rough way in the world could be plagued with-an axiom in domestic economics which the daily task of providing food for fifteen hearty feeders, including himself and wife, had no doubt a powerful tendency to reinforce and confirm; and he consequently never made himself, nor permitted others to make, the slightest remark, commendatory or otherwise, upon the food placed before them; savoury or unsavoury, ill or well cooked, half raw, dried up, done to a turn or bubble-no comment was allowed; and such in this, as in all other life-practices, was the effect of habit, that Dr. Franklin declares he had not the slightest choice or taste in matters of eating or drinking, and that five minutes after he had dined, it required a considerable effort of memory to recall to mind what he had partaken of a deficiency of gastronomical appreciation which a Frenchman would no doubt hold to be significant of a lamentably low state of civilization, but which nevertheless proved to be the key-stone of Benjamin Franklin's elevation in the social scale.

The

In 1717, Benjamin's much older brother, Josiah, returned from England with presses and types, and commenced business in Boston as a master printer, and received Benjamin as an in-door apprentice. boy's sea-dreams being thus finally dissipated, he manfully resigned himself to the thenceforth inevitable fact, and addressed himself to the acquirement of the printer's craft with zealous industry. It was not long, moreover, before he hit upon a novel mode of increasing his brother's business, and at the same time ventilating, in some slight

degree, his own secret ambition of authorship. He wrote two ballads -one woeful, called the Light House Tragedy, in which the untimely deaths of Captain Wetherlake and his two daughters were rhymingly set forth; the other was triumphal, and celebrative of the recent capture and death of Blackbeard, a notorious pirate. These were composed and sent to press; and the author, at his master-brother's suggestion, hawked and cried them about the streets of Boston. Blackbeard had a tremendous run, but the more doleful ditty went off less briskly. Franklin, senior, appears to have been a good deal scandalized at this proceeding, not so much that his son should hawk, as write ballads-rhyming and rags being inseparably connected with each other in the worthy man's mind, and he solemnly warned the young literary aspirant against indulgence in such a beggar-breeding propensity. Benjamin's love of reading, meanwhile, continued unabated; and, in order to procure books, he offered his brother to board himself for half the money which his meals were reckoned to cost. This was readily agreed to, and thanks to the want of a distinguishing palate, as well as to the vegetarian doctrine he had derived from the perusal of a book by Mr. Tyan, who demonstrated to the lad's entire conviction the sinfulness and cruelty of killing and devouring beasts, birds, and fishes, which had quite as much right to live as their slayers and eaters, he saved a full moiety of the half-allowance paid him by his brother, and his library began sensibly to increase. At about the same time, he formed an intimate acquaintance with a young man named Collins, a clerk in the Post-office, and of congenial bookish and controversial taste and temperament, but not, as it subsequently proved, associated, as with young Franklin, with sterling principle and habits of self-denial.

In 1720, the elder brother ventured to start a newspaper, though strongly warned of the folly of such an undertaking by the wise greybeards of the city, who urged that America could never support two newspapers; the one already established being quite, indeed more than sufficient to supply the political literature of that continent. The project was, however, persisted in, and the Boston Gazette flourished for a time reasonably well, the original matter being supplied by amateur writers, whose politics accorded with those of the paper, amongst whom Benjamin Franklin was eagerly desirous to try his 'prentice hand; but being quite aware that a prophet has little chance of honourable recognition by his own family, he disguised his hand, and slipped the paper containing his first leading article under the office door overnight, that being, it should seem, the ordinary mode of forwarding contributions to the editor. The paper was read, approved, and published, and thenceforth the writer became a regular, though still anonymous, contributor to the columns of the Boston Gazette, till an unlooked-for crisis in the journal's affairs entirely changed his position with regard to it. The House of Assembly took offence at some strictures inserted in the paper-the proprietor was arrested upon the warrant of Mr. Speaker-sentenced to one month's imprisonment, and ordered to discontinue the publication of his journal. This Napoleonic mode of dealing with the press could only be evaded, it was thought, by publishing the paper in Benjamin Franklin's name,