A rapid composer and a workman full of resource, Franklin was soon recognized as the master spirit of the shop. Sir William Keith (1680-1749), governor of the province, urged him to start in business for himself, and when Franklin had unsuccessfully appealed to his father for the means to do so, Keith promised to furnish him with what he needed for the equipment of a new printing office and sent him to England to buy the materials. Keith had repeatedly promised to send a letter of credit by the ship on which Franklin sailed, but when the Channel was reached and the ship's mails were examined no such letter was found. Franklin reached London in December 1724, and found employment first at Palmer's, a famous printing house in Bartholomew Close, and afterwards at Watts's Printing House. At Palmer's he had set up a second edition of Wollaston's _Religion of Nature Delineated_. To refute this book and to prove that there could be no such thing as religion, he wrote and printed a small pamphlet, _A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain_, which brought him some curious acquaintances, and of which he soon became thoroughly ashamed. After a year and a half in London, Franklin was persuaded by a friend named Denham, a Quaker merchant, to return with him to America and engage in mercantile business; he accordingly gave up printing, but a few days before sailing he received a tempting offer to remain and give lessons in swimming--his feats as a swimmer having given him considerable reputation--and he says that he might have consented "had the overtures been sooner made." He reached Philadelphia in October 1726, but a few months later Denham died, and Franklin was induced by large wages to return to his old employer Keimer; with Keimer he quarrelled repeatedly, thinking himself ill used and kept only to train apprentices until they could in some degree take his place. In 1728 Franklin and Hugh Meredith, a fellow-worker at Keimer's, set up in business for themselves; the capital being furnished by Meredith's father. In 1730 the partnership was dissolved, and Franklin, through the financial assistance of two friends, secured the sole management of the printing house. In September 1729 he bought at a merely nominal price _The Pennsylvania Gazette_, a weekly newspaper which Keimer had started nine months before to defeat a similar project of Franklin's, and which Franklin conducted until 1765. Franklin's superior management of the paper, his new type, "some spirited remarks" on the controversy between the Massachusetts assembly and Governor Burnet, brought his paper into immediate notice, and his success both as a printer and as a journalist was assured and complete. In 1731 he established in Philadelphia one of the earliest circulating libraries in America (often said to have been the earliest), and in 1732 he published the first of his Almanacks, under the pseudonym of Richard Saunders. These "Poor Richard's