OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. BY JAMES PARTON, AUTHOR OF “Life and times of aaron burr,” “life of andrew jackSON," ETC. With Finely Engraved Portraits. VOL. I. BOSTON: HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY. PREFACE. In the year 1771, the sixty-fifth of Franklin's life, when he was spending some pleasant weeks of the summer at the country house of his friend, the good Bishop of St. Asaphs, he began to write an account of his early life, in the form of a letter to his son, the Governor of New Jersey. When he had written twenty-three sheets, which brought down the narrative to the time of his marriage, in his twenty-sixth year, his holiday ended, and he was drawn again into the whirlpool of politics. Thirteen years passed before he was able to continue the work. At Passy, in 1784, the independence of his country having been secured, he was urged by friends who had read or heard of the unfinished Autobiography, to go on with it. He wrote one more chapter at Passy. Resuming the narrative, four years later, at Philadelphia, he continued it to his fifty-first year, when he had arrived in England as agent for Pennsylvania. He had both leisure and strength to complete the work, but, as he approached the time of his more conspicuous public life, his modesty took the alarm, and he could not prevail upon himself to relate occurrences which, if they were related truly, would oblige him to present himself as the central figure in important public scenes. He ceased to write when he had just related his entrance upon the European part of his career. He sent a copy of what he had written to his old and valued friend, M. Le Veillard, of Passy, who, a year or two after the death of Franklin, permitted part of the manuscript to be translated into French and published in Paris. It was translated back into English, and published in London in the year 1793, and continued to circulate in this form, in England and America, for twenty years. This portion of the Autobiography was even retranslated into |