The Inquisition in Portugal had, with utmost gravity, condemned Bickerstaff’s predictions and the readers of them, and had burnt his predictions. The Company of Stationers in London obtained in 1709 an injunction against the issuing of any almanac by John Partridge, as if in fact he were dead. * * * * * If the fame of this foolery was through all parts of Europe, it must also have crossed to the English colonies of America, and by reference to this fact we may explain the curious literary parallel Poor Richard’s Almanac affords. Twenty-five years later Benjamin Franklin played the selfsame joke in Philadelphia. Franklin was but two years old when Swift and his Bickerstaff coadjutors were jesting. But by the time he had grown and wandered to Philadelphia and become a journeyman printer--by 1733--Addison, Steele, Prior, and Congreve had died, and Swift’s wonderful mind was turned upon and eating itself in the silent deanery of St. Patrick’s. Conditions about him gave Franklin every opportunity for the jest. The almanac in the America of 1733 had even greater acceptance than the like publication of England in Isaac Bickerstaff’s day. No output of the colonial press, not even the publication of theological tracts, was so frequent or so remunerative. It was the sole annual which commonly penetrated the farmhouse of the colonists, where it hung in neighborly importance near the Bible, Fox’s “Book of Martyrs,” and Jonathan Edwards’s tractate on “The Freedom of the Human Will.” And it had uses. Besides furnishing a calendar, weather prophecies, and jokes, it added receipts for cooking, pickling, dyeing, and in many ways was the “Useful Companion” its title-page proclaimed. So keen, practical, and energetic a nature as Franklin’s could not let the opportunity pass for turning a penny, and with the inimitable adaptability that marked him all his life he begins his Poor Richard of 1733: “Courteous Reader, I might in this place attempt to gain thy favour by declaring that I write Almanacks with no other view than that of the publick good, but in this I should not be sincere; and men are now-a-days too wise to be deceiv’d by pretences, how specious soever. The plain truth of the matter is, I am excessive poor, and my wife, good woman, is, I tell her, excessive proud; she can not bear, she says, to sit spinning in her shift of tow, while I do nothing but gaze at the stars; and has threatened more than once to burn all my books and rattling-traps (as she calls my instruments), if I do not make some profitable use of them for the good of my family. The printer has offer’d me some considerable share of the profits, and I have thus began to comply with my dame’s desire.