Meantime that strange character, Beaumarchais, the author of “The Barber of Seville” and “The Marriage of Figaro,” and still a distinguished light of French literature, fired by the general enthusiasm for the Americans, constituted himself their agent and ambassador, and was by no means an unimportant one. He was the son of a respectable watch-maker, and when a mere youth had distinguished himself by the invention of an improvement in escapements, which was stolen by another watch-maker, who announced it as his own. Beaumarchais appealed to the Academy of Sciences in a most cleverly written petition, and it decided in his favor. Great attention had been drawn to him by the contest; he appeared at court, and was soon making wonderful little watches for the king and queen; he became a favorite, the familiar friend of the king’s daughters, and his career as an adventurer, courtier, and speculator began. A most wonderful genius, typical in many ways of his century, few men have ever lived who could play so many parts, and his excellent biographer, Loménie, has summed up the occupations in which he excelled: “Watch-maker, musician, song writer, dramatist, comic writer, man of fashion, courtier, man of business, financier, manufacturer, publisher, ship-owner, contractor, secret agent, negotiator, pamphleteer, orator on certain occasions, a peaceful man by taste, and yet always at law, engaging, like Figaro, in every occupation, Beaumarchais was concerned in most of the events, great or small, which preceded the Revolution.” He traded all over the world, and made three or four fortunes and lost them; he had at times forty vessels of his own on the ocean, and his private man-of-war assisted the French navy at the battle of Grenada. In fact, he was like his great contemporary, Voltaire, who, besides being a dramatist, a philosopher, a man of letters, and a reformer, was one of the ablest business men of France, a ship-owner, contractor, and millionaire. The resemblance of Franklin to these two men is striking. He showed the same versatility of talents, though perhaps in less degree. He had the same strange ability to excel at the same time in both literary and practical affairs, he had very much the same opinion on religion, and his morals, like Voltaire’s, were somewhat irregular. When we connect with this his wonderful reputation in France, the adoration of the people, and the strange way in which during his residence in Paris he became part of the French nation, we are almost led to believe that through some hidden process the causes which produced Franklin must have been largely of French origin. He is, indeed, more French than English, and seems to belong with Beaumarchais and Voltaire rather than with Chatham, Burke, or Priestley.