than anything else he read to his dying day. Lad though he was, the rare wit, the rich humor, the grace of style, the worldly wisdom of the " Spectator," amazed and delighted him. After nightfall, on Sundays, in the early morning, whenever he had a moment to spare, the book was before him. Again and again he read the essays and determined to make them his model. He would take some number that particularly pleased him, jot down the substance of each sentence, put by the notes, and, after a day or two, reproduce the essay in language of his own. This practice convinced him that his great want was a stock of words, and he at once began to turn the tales into verse. The search after words that would not change the sense, yet were of length to suit the meter and of sound to suit the rhyme, was, he felt sure, the best way to supply the deficiency.

When his vocabulary had been enlarged, Franklin began to study arrangement of thought. Then he would put down his notes in any order, and after a while seek to rearrange the sentences in the order of the essay. Next he fell to reading books on navigation and arithmetic, rhetoric and grammar, Locke "On the Human Understanding," and "The Art of Thinking," by the members of Port Royal. Some of these he bought. The money to buy

with was obtained by persuading the brother to give him half the shillings paid out in board and let him board himself, by putting in practice a theory of vegetable diet, by refusing meat and fish, eating bread and biscuit, and so saying a little even of the pittance.

Thus equipped, Benjamin began his literary career at the age of fifteen. After holding office seven months, the successor of John Campbell was turned out, the "Boston Gazette " passed to other hands, James Franklin ceased to print it, and amazed the town by starting a newspaper of his own. The name of this weekly was the "New England Courant." In point of time it came fourth in the colonies, for, the day before the first number was seen at Boston, Bradford's "American Mercury" appeared at Philadelphia. In quality the “Courant" was the most readable, the most entertaining, the most aggressive newspaper of the four. Precisely what the early numbers contained cannot now be known, for not an impression of a number earlier than the eighteenth is extant. It is certain, however, that they were filled with sprightly contributions from a set of young men who, weary of the dullness of the "News Letter" and the 66 Gazette," came to the office of James Franklin and supplied the "Courant" with what passed for wit. They were, we are told, young doc

tors, and had picked up some knowledge of medicine by watching the barbers cup and let blood, and by pounding drugs and serving as apprentices in the offices of physicians of the town.

Though their knowledge of physic was small, their impudence was great, and the "Courant," before the fourth number was reached, had plunged into a warm dispute over the greatest medical discovery of the age. What Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had done for Europe, Cotton Mather was doing for America. He had read in the "Transactions of the Royal Society" of the wonders of inoculation, believed in it, and was urging and begging his townsmen to submit to a trial. Indeed, he was demonstrating the efficacy of the preventive before their very eyes. But for his pains they rewarded him as every man has been rewarded who ever yet bestowed any blessing on the human race. He was called a fool. He was pronounced mad. He was told that the smallpox, which that very year was carrying off one in every thirteen of the inhabitants of Boston, was a scourge sent from God, and that to seek to check it was impious. One wretch flung a lighted handgrenade, with some vile language attached, through a window of Mather's house. The "Courant" declared that inoculation was from

the devil. Were not the ministers for it, and did not the devil often use good men to spread his delusions on the world? Increase Mather called this "a horrid thing to be related;" said, with truth, that he had seen the time when the civil government would have speedily put down such "a cursed libel;" withdrew his subscription, and sent his grandson each week to the office to buy a copy of the sheet. Cotton Mather applied to the "Courant" such epithets as he might have used in speaking of a book by Calef. The newspaper was, he said, "full freighted with nonsense, unmanliness, raillery, profaneness, immorality, arrogance, calumnies, lies, contradictions, and whatnot." The whole town was divided. Some remonstrated with James Franklin on the street. Some attacked him in the "News Letter" and the "Gazette." So many hastened to support him that forty new subscribers were secured in a month. Such an increase was great, for no newspaper then pretended to have a circulation of three hundred copies.

It was at this time, while the dispute with the Mathers was warmest, that some manuscript was found one morning on the printing-house floor. Benjamin wrote it, and modestly thrust it under the door during the night. The “Autobiography" makes no mention of what these

sheets contained, but there is much reason to believe that the manuscript was the first of those brief letters with which for six months Silence Dogood amused the readers of the "Courant."

The Dogood papers find no place in any of Franklin's collected writings. They were not even ascribed to him till Mr. Parton wrote his biography. But, in the notes and memoranda jotted down by Franklin when about to write the “Autobiography," he claims the Dogood papers as his own. They are clearly Franklin's work; and so well did the lad catch the spirit, the peculiar diction, the humor of his model, the "Spectator," that he seems to have written with a copy of Addison open before him. "I have observed," says the short-faced gentleman in the opening paragraph of the first number of the "Spectator," "that a reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure till he knows whether the writer of it be a black or a fair man, of a mild or a choleric disposition, married or a bachelor, with other peculiarities of a like nature that conduce very much to a right understanding of an author." "As the generality of people," says Mrs. Dogood in the opening paragraph of the first of her epistles, now-a-days are unwilling either to commend or dispraise what they read till they are in

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