Produced by Mark C. Orton, Christine Aldridge and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net Transcriber's Notes: 1. Passages in italics are surrounded by _underscores_ Words with gesperrt (wide) letter spacing are surrounded with =equals= This text uses UTF-8 (unicode) file encoding. If the apostrophes and quotation marks in this paragraph appear as garbage, you may have an incompatible browser or unavailable fonts. First, make sure that your browser’s “character set” or “file encoding” is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You may also need to change the default font. 2. The editor of the original book marked some mispelled words with [_sic_], and these have been retained as written, uncorrected. Additional words found to be mispelled have been corrected and are listed under "Spelling Corrections" at the end of this e-text. Additionally this work contains a large number of word spelling variations found to be valid in Webster's English Dictionary as well as several unverified spellings that appear multiple times and inconsistant word capitalization and hyphenation, all of which have been retained as printed. The interested reader will find an alphabetic "Word Variations" list at the end of this e-text. 3. Numbered footnotes in Sections I-VII of the Introduction have been relocated to the end of the Introduction and marked with an "i-". Lettered footnotes in the "Selections" have been relocated directly under the paragraph they pertain to. 4. Additional Transcriber's Notes are located at the "Poor Richards Almanack" facsimile reproduction beginning on page 225, and at the end of this e-text. * * * * * * AMERICAN WRITERS SERIES * HARRY HAYDEN CLARK _General Editor_ * AMERICAN WRITERS SERIES _Volumes of representative selections, prepared by American scholars under the general editorship of Harry Hayden Clark, University of Wisconsin._ _Volumes now ready are starred._ AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISTS, _Raymond Adams, University of North Carolina_ *WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT, _Tremaine McDowell, University of Minnesota_ *JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, _Robert E. Spiller, Swarthmore College_ *JONATHAN EDWARDS, _Clarence H. Faust, University of Chicago, and Thomas H. Johnson, Hackley School_ *RALPH WALDO EMERSON, _Frederic I. Carpenter, Harvard University_ *BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, _Frank Luther Mott and Chester E. Jorgenson, University of Iowa_ *ALEXANDER HAMILTON AND THOMAS JEFFERSON, _Frederick C. Prescott, Cornell University_ BRET HARTE *NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, _Austin Warren, Boston University_ OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, _Robert Shafer, University of Cincinnati_ *WASHINGTON IRVING, _Henry A. Pochmann, Mississippi State College_ HENRY JAMES, _Lyon Richardson, Western Reserve University_ ABRAHAM LINCOLN *HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, _Odell Shepard, Trinity College_