Franklin’s first correspondent of this sort was Miss Catherine Ray, of Rhode Island. They were great friends and exchanged some beautiful letters, almost unequalled in the English language. They are collected in Bigelow’s “Works of Franklin,” vol. ii. pp. 387, 414, 495. The letter at page 387 begins “Dear Katy,” and ends “believe me, my dear girl, your affectionate faithful friend and humble servant.” The letter at page 414 begins “My Katy,” speaks of her as “dear girl,” and ends with the same phrase as the previous one, except that the word “faithful” is left out. The one at page 495 begins “Dear Katy,” and closes “Adieu dear good girl and believe me ever your affectionate friend.” In none of these letters does he speak of her as his daughter. The letters to Miss Catherine Louisa Shipley and to Miss Georgiana Shipley, the daughters of the Bishop of St. Asaph, are friendly but not very endearing in the terms used. He once calls Georgiana “My dear friend,” and in the famous letter on the squirrel addresses her as “My dear Miss.” He nowhere calls them his daughters. The letters that come nearest to what the reviewer wants are those to Miss Mary Stevenson. There are quite a number of them, and she and Franklin were on the most affectionate terms. We will give the citations of them in Bigelow, although any one can look them up in the index: In vol. iii. pp. 34, 46, 54, 56, 62, 139, 151, 186, 187, 195, 209, 232, 238, 245; in vol. iv. pp. 17, 33, 212, 258, 264, 287, 332, 339; in vol. x. p. 285. These letters call Miss Stevenson “Dear Polly,” “My dear friend,” “My good girl,” and “My dear good girl.” The first of them, vol. iii. p. 34, begins by addressing her as “dear child,” and another, vol. iii. p. 209, closes by saying “Adieu my dear child. I will call you so. Why should I not call you so, since I love you with all the tenderness of a father.” This may be what the reviewer had in his mind. But Franklin nowhere calls Miss Stevenson his daughter. The word daughter and child are very different. We all of us often call children we fancy “my child.” Franklin’s use of the word child as applied to Miss Stevenson has from the context of the letters a perfectly obvious meaning,--no one can mistake it; just as his use of the word daughter in the Foxcroft letters has, from the context and all the circumstances, a perfectly obvious meaning. It would be endless to discuss all the reviewer’s irrelevant and extravagant statements. We shall call attention to only one other illustration of his methods. He closes one of his wild paragraphs by saying that if “Mr. Fisher wishes further knowledge on this subject for ‘speculation,’ we recommend him to read Franklin’s letter to Foxcroft of September 7, 1774.”