The autobiography of John Woolman was the gradual and secret growth of many years, beginning when he was of the age of thirty-six, and added to from time to time until, at the age of fifty-two, being in the city of York, in England, about the business of his Master, he was stricken down of the smallpox, whereof he died. Besides this story of his life, he left several ethical and religious essays. All these writings are, as Whittier has said, in the style “of a man unlettered, but with natural refinement and delicate sense of fitness, the purity of whose heart enters into his language.” “The secret of Woolman’s purity of style,” said Channing, “is that his eye was single, and that conscience dictated the words.” There is about John Woolman’s writings that unconventionality of thought, that charity without pretence, that saintliness without sanctimony or sourness, that delicacy, that untaught beauty of phrase, by which we are helped to understand the ardour of Charles Lamb’s love for him, as uttered in his impulsive exhortation to the readers of the _Essays of Elia_: “Get the writings of John Woolman by heart.” “A perfect gem!” wrote Henry Crabb Robinson, in 1824, of Woolman’s _Journal_, which Lamb had shortly before made known to him. “His is a ‘schöne Seele.’ An illiterate tailor, he writes in a style of the most exquisite purity and grace. His moral qualities are transferred to his writings.” Perhaps, after all, the aroma that lingers about Woolman’s words is best described by Woolman’s true spiritual successor in American literature--Whittier--in the saying, that he who reads these writings becomes sensible “of a sweetness as of violets.” _Benjamin Franklin._--For the period of the Revolution the writings of Franklin fall naturally into two principal divisions--first, those connected with the Revolutionary controversy, and, secondly, those almost entirely apart from it. Among the latter, of course, are to be reckoned his numerous papers on scientific discoveries and mechanical inventions; a considerable number of his personal letters--these being, perhaps, the wisest and wittiest of all his writings; many short sketches, usually playful in tone, often in the form of apologues or parables; finally, the first, and the best, part of his _Autobiography_, which, during the hundred years succeeding its first publication in 1791, has probably been the most widely read book of its class in any language. Here, then, as a product of Franklin’s general literary activity during the Revolutionary period, is a considerable body of literature not concerned in the strifes of that bitter time, almost faultless in form, and so pervaded by sense, gaiety, and kindness, as to be among the most precious and most delightful of the intellectual treasures of mankind.