Franklin courted fame no more than fortune. The best of his writings, after his retirement from journalism, he never gave to the press at all; not even his incomparable autobiography, which is still republished more frequently than any of the writings of Dickens or of Thackeray. He always wrote for a larger purpose than mere personal gratification of any kind. Even his bagatelles and _jeux d'esprit_ read in the salons of Paris, though apparently intended for the eyes of a small circle, were inspired by a desire to make friends and create respect for the struggling people and the great cause he represented. Few if any of them got into print until many years after his decease. Franklin was from his youth up a leader, a lion in whatever circle he entered, whether in the printing-house, the provincial Assemblies, as agent in England, or as a courtier in France. There was no one too eminent in science or literature, on either side of the Atlantic, not to esteem his acquaintance a privilege. He was an honorary member of every important scientific association in the world, and in friendly correspondence with most of those who conferred upon those bodies any distinction; and all this by force of a personal, not to say planetary, attraction that no one brought within his sphere could long resist. Pretty much all of importance that we know of Franklin we gather from his private correspondence. His contemporaries wrote or at least printed very little about him; scarcely one of the multitude whose names he embalmed in his 'Autobiography' ever printed a line about him. All that we know of the later half of his life not covered by his autobiography, we owe almost exclusively to his private and official correspondence. Though reckoning among his warm friends and correspondents such men as David Hume, Dr. Joseph Priestley, Dr. Price, Lord Kames, Lord Chatham, Dr. Fothergill, Peter Collinson, Edmund Burke, the Bishop of St. Asaph and his gifted daughters, Voltaire, the habitues of the Helvetius salon, the Marquis de Segur, the Count de Vergennes, his near neighbors De Chaumont and Le Veillard, the _maire_ of Passy,--all that we learn of his achievements, of his conversation, of his daily life, from these or many other associates of only less prominence in the Old World, might be written on a single foolscap sheet. Nor are we under much greater obligations to his American friends. It is to his own letters (and except his 'Autobiography,' he can hardly be said to have written anything in any other than the epistolary form; and that was written in the form of a letter to his son William, and most of it only began to be published a quarter of a century after his death) that we must turn to learn how full of interest and importance to mankind was this last half-century of his life. Beyond keeping copies of his correspondence, which his official character made a duty as well as a necessity, he appears to have taken no precautions to insure the