Of much of Franklin's work as an author something has already been said. Judged as literature, the first place belongs to his _Autobiography_, which unquestionably ranks among the few great autobiographies ever written. His style in its simplicity, facility and clearness owed something to De Foe, something to Cotton Mather, something to Plutarch, more to Bunyan and to his early attempts to reproduce the manner of the third volume of the _Spectator_; and not the least to his own careful study of word usage. From Xenophon's _Memorabilia_ he learned when a boy the Socratic method of argument. Swift he resembled in the occasional broadness of his humour, in his brilliantly successful use of sarcasm and irony,[10] and in his mastery of the hoax. Balzac said of him that he "invented the lightning-rod, the hoax ('le canard') and the republic." Among his more famous hoaxes were the "Edict of the King of Prussia" (1773), already described; the fictitious supplement to the Boston _Chronicle_, printed on his private press at Passy in 1782, and containing a letter with an invoice of eight packs of 954 cured, dried, hooped and painted scalps of rebels, men, women and children, taken by Indians in the British employ; and another fictitious _Letter from the Count de Schaumberg to the Baron Hohendorf commanding the Hessian Troops in America_ (1777)--the count's only anxiety is that not enough men will be killed to bring him in moneys he needs, and he urges his officer in command in America "to prolong the war ... for I have made arrangements for a grand Italian opera, and I do not wish to be obliged to give it up."[11]