AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND LIFE.--Franklin's _Autobiography_ stands first among works of its kind in American literature. The young person who does not read it misses both profit and entertainment. Some critics have called it "the equal of Robinson Crusoe, one of the few everlasting books in the English language." In this small volume, begun in 1771, Franklin tells us that he was born in Boston in 1706, one of the seventeen children of a poor tallow chandler, that his branch of the Franklin family had lived for three hundred years or more in the village of Ecton, Northamptonshire, where the head of the family, in Queen Mary's reign, read from an English _Bible_ concealed under a stool, while a child watched for the coming of the officers. He relates how he attended school from the age of eight to ten, when he had to leave to help his father mold and wick candles. His meager schooling was in striking contrast to the Harvard education of Cotton Mather and the Yale training of Jonathan Edwards, who was only three years Franklin's senior. But no man reaches Franklin's fame without an education. His early efforts to secure this are worth giving in his own language:-- "From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the _Pilgrim's Progress_, my first collection was of John Bunyan's works in separate little volumes.... Plutarch's _Lives_ there was in which I read abundantly, and I still think that time spent to great advantage. There was also a book of De Foe's, called an _Essay on Projects_, and another of Dr. Mather's, called _Essays to do Good_, which perhaps gave me a turn of thinking that had an influence on some of the principal future events of my life.... Often I sat up in my room reading the greatest part of the night." He relates how he taught himself to write by reading and reproducing in his own language the papers from Addison's _Spectator_. Franklin says that the "little ability" in writing, developed through his self-imposed tasks, was a principal means of his advancement in after life.