failing to indicate omissions in a letter, though he might have had the example of Chief Justice Marshall, was not justifiable when the appearance of the printed page was such that one might naturally infer that the text was complete. Sparks never felt that the final amends

A reproduction of Andrews' engraving (1855) of Stuart's unfinished portrait painted in 1828. There is a half-length painted by T. Sully and engraved by S. A. Schoff, which accompanies a memoir in the National Port. Gallery. There is an engraving of a bust by Powers, owned by the family, of which casts exist in Harvard College library and in the Mass. Hist. Soc. library.

printed by Sparks; and during the last fifty years a very great number of Washington's letters have been printed which Sparks either did not know of, or could not include in his scheme.1

As a necessary complement to the body of Washington letters, Sparks had selected, while the papers were in his hands, a body of letters addressed to Washington, and from copies of them then made he arranged and published in four volumes at a later day, Correspondence of the American Revolution, being letters of eminent men to George Washington from the time of his taking command of the army to the end of his Presi dency (Boston, 1853). He printed all letters entire, and corrected " errors of grammar and obvious blunders, the result of hasty composition." 2 He points out the necessity of this in respect to some of the English letters of Rochambeau and Lafayette.

Beside the letter-books bound in Washington's time, there came into Sparks's hands a considerable mass of loose papers in bundles, and while they were at Cambridge, Sparks had these last arranged in a chronological order and bound, and added an index. The entire collection as it now stands in the library of the Department of State has an extent of more than two hundred bound volumes, including 62 volumes of letters written by Washington, and 119 of letters addressed to him.

The second and third manuscript accessions to the collections in the Department of State were successive parts of the Madison Papers bought in 1837 and 1845.4

The papers consist of both originals and copies, and J. C. Hamilton says the copies omit parts of the originals, and that in his Republic of the United States he had made use of these omitted parts. When Madison was known to be preparing his papers for transmission, he was often supposed to be preparing an historical review of his times; but he seems never to have intended such a work.1

The fourth purchase was the Monroe Papers, in 1849, for which $20,000 were paid.2

The fifth included, beside the second part of the Madison Papers as already mentioned, the papers of Thomas Jefferson and of Alexander Hamilton.3

Respectfully thinly yous, Jared Spark's

The Jefferson Papers were found after his death to embrace 26,000 letters written to him, and the drafts of 16,000 written by him. They were in the hands of his grandson, Randolph, when he published his edition in 1829; and Tucker in 1837 made further use of them. When the government acquired them 5 they made 137 quarto volumes as bound. Randall found material still in the possession of the family, which formed an addition to the assistance he got from those in the government's hands, a large part of which had never appeared in any edition of Jefferson's works.6

The papers of Hamilton, embraced in 65 folio volumes, and costing the government $25,000, had been used by Mr. John C. Hamilton in his Life of his father in 1840, and were drawn upon by him again in 1850 in editing for the government an edition of Hamilton's writings.7

The last mass of historical papers acquired (1882) by the Department of State is what is known as the Stevens Collection of the Papers of Franklin.

It is first necessary to trace their relations to what we know of the manuscripts of Franklin. No publication of the works of Franklin, of any historical importance, appeared before the Collection edited by Benjamin Vaughan in 1779.8 What is known as the Robinson edition of the Works of Franklin appeared in 1793, and included the re-Englished version of the Autobiography, with a continuation, mainly by Dr. Stuber, taken from the Columbian Magazine. Then came Castéra's edition in French in 1797 or 1798 (“an VI de la Republique") in two volumes.

The London trade edition of 1806 was edited by Marshall, with the assistance of Benjamin Vaughan, and in the preface there was a charge that an authoritative edition of Franklin's writings from material in the hands of his grandson, Wm. Temple Franklin, had been kept back by the interference of the British government, who had paid for the suppression of the papers. There is no evidence to support such a charge, and W. T. Franklin indignantly denied it, though it is not improbable that his father, Gov. William Franklin, who lived till 1813, a pensioner of the crown for services rendered in America, may have been adverse to the publication of the family material. It is also not unlikely that the interests of the London publishers were so centred in the successive trade editions that no one would give sufficient encouragement to a new venture. The charge of bribery was sifted and found without warrant in the Edinburgh Review (July, 1806), but there was nevertheless a certain uneasy suspicion not wholly allayed, and shared in some degree by Jefferson, 10 that found some ground in the comparative scarcity of the diplomatic papers, which W. T. Franklin finally included in his Memoirs of the life and writings of Benjamin Franklin, written by himself to a late period, and con

1 Letters and other Writings, iii. 293. 30, 448, 549, 603; iv. 45, 182. I am informed by Mr. W. C. Ford, that a mass of letters to Madison from Washington, E. Randolph, E. Pendleton, Jos. Jones, Jonathan Drayton and others, beside several hundred drafts of his own letters, were retained by Mrs. Madison, and passed into the hands of Mr. F. B. McGuire of Washington, who now owns them. Statutes at Large, ix. 370. There are also Monroe papers in the keeping of Mrs. S. L. Gouverneur, jr. I am informed that they have latterly been deposited in the Department of State, and a Calendar of them printed. Schouler (United States, ii., preface) speaks (1882) of the unassorted mass of the Monroe papers in the State Department, and further says (iii., preface) that he examined the entire mass. These papers are at present classified in boxes and roughly calendared.

3 Act making appropriations for the civil and diplo matic expenses, approved Aug. 12, 1848. $20,000 were voted by Congress for the purchase, and $6,000 for the printing. Statutes at Large, ix. 284, 594.

Parton, p. 689.

5 Reports on the purchase. Cf. Tompkin's Bibl. Jef fersoniana (N. Y., 1887), and Poore's Descriptive Catalogue.

6 Cf., on the lives of Jefferson and the material used in them, ante, Vol. VII. p. 303, etc. An additional collection is described in a Classified List of manuscripts, books, correspondence, etc., of Thomas Jefferson, offered by purchase to the United States by Sarah N. Randolph (Washington, 1889). This collection consists of 360 letters written by, and 5000 to, Jefferson; beside farm, garden, pocket, law memorandum, diary and account books, with other

papers.

Statutes at Large, ix. 284, 646. The originals were also examined, and such as had been printed were collated with J. C. Hamilton's text for Henry Cabot Lodge's edition of The Writings of Hamilton,

8 A supplemental collection, which contained some of the political paners, appeared in 1787.

9 Stevens's Hist. Coll., i. p. 170.

10 Bigelow's ed., introd.; and Edinburgh Review, July. 1830.

tinued to the time of his death by his grandson, William Temple Franklin, now first published from the original manuscripts, comprising the private correspondence and public negotiations of Dr. Franklin, and a selection from his political, philosophical, and miscellaneous works (London, 1818, 1817, 1819, — 3 vols. in this order of date). This was published in three quarto volumes, and in six octavos. William Duane had already entered upon the publication of an edition in Philadelphia (first volume issued in 1809) when W. T. Franklin's was announced, and by a later agreement the two editors finally worked in unison, one preparing the edition for the London market and the other that for the American, which last was issued in six octavo volumes and contains considerable matter not in the London edition.

The first volume of Duane's edition (the last issued) is called Memoirs of the life and writings of Benjamin Franklin, written by himself and continued by his grandson, W. Temple Franklin; together with the whole of his political, philosophical, and miscellaneous works (Philad., 1818).1

The other volumes are called Works on philosophy, politics, and morals, beside all the writings published in former collections, his diplomatic correspondence, a variety of literary articles and epistolary correspondence, never before published, with memoirs and anecdotes of his life.

Colburn, in London, also published in 1817 Franklin's Private Correspondence, comprising a series of letters written between 1753 and 1790, . from the originals, by his grandson, William Temple Franklin, which in a second edition (1817) contained a supplement not in the large work. This was only a separate issue of vol. ii. of the Memoirs.

This was the condition of affairs when Sparks, having finished his Washington, turned his attention to Franklin. His first venture was to annotate what he called A Collection of familiar letters and miscellaneous papers of Benjamin Franklin, now for the first time published (Boston, 1833; and beginning Familiar Letters, etc., London, 1833). It was between 1836 and 1840 that he published at Boston, in ten volumes, what remained for fifty years the standard edition of Franklin's works: The Works of Benjamin Franklin, with notes and a life of the author.2 In the first volume Sparks gave the autobiography, following the text of W. T. Franklin, to which he added a continuation to Franklin's death.

1 There were reissues of this edition in Philadelphia, 1834, 1840, 1858. Vols. v. aud vi. of Duane's edition were translated badly in French by Charles Malo, and published at Paris, 1817, as Correspondence inédite et secrète du Docteur B. Franklin. Cf. Ford's Bibliog. of Franklin, with some parts of which that gentleman has favored me in advance of publication.

2 Reissued, Boston, 1844-56; Chicago, 1882. The plates were at one time in the hands of Henry Stevens, who intended to issue a new edition with the aid of the MSS. in his keeping; but because these MSS. became pledged, or for some other reason, the project was added to the numerous unperfected ventures of that gentleman (Sabin, vii. p. 27). The plates are now, or were recently, owned by W. F. Poole, of Chicago.

3 This volume was issued separately in 1844, 1856, 1857, 1859, etc.; reprinted in London in 1850, and in Dessau, Germany, in 1854.

The autobiography has a distinct story of itself, which may well be told here. It was written in parts successively in 1771, 1784, and 1788. It is known that Franklin gave or perhaps lent a copy, before the final pages were written, to M. le Veillard, mayor of Passy, and it is probable that at some period copies were intrusted to Dr. Price and Benjamin Vaughan in London. It was first made public early in 1791 in a French version, Mémoires de la vie privée de Benjamin Franklin, écrits par lui-même, published in Paris by Buisson, usually attributed to Jacques Gibelin; but this version was only of the part first written. It is not certainly known what copy of the original the translator used, though Le Veillard, to vindicate himself against the charge of injuring W. T. Franklin's interest, published a protest against the publication. It was from this French rendering that a German version was published in Berlin in 1792; and an English version was printed in London in 1793 by Robinson, in an issue of the works of Franklin edited by Vaughan, after the publication had been delayed for nearly two years in hopes that W. T. Franklin's edition would appear. This book, the Works of the late Dr. Benjamin Franklin, consisting of his life written by himself, together with essays, etc., was the same year reprinted in Dublin, and has since been often reproduced in Great Britain and in America, and the text of the autobiography was followed in the main in an improved French translation by

Castéra, published in 1798. Another English retranslation appeared also in 1793 in London, published by Parsons, and called The private life of the late Benjamin Franklin, .. originally written by himself, and now translated from the French, to which are added some account of his public life, a variety of anecdotes concerning him, by MM. Brissot, Condorcet, Rochefoucault, Le Roy, etc., and the Eulogium of M. Fauchet. This was the first English edition.

It is not known that this last London translation has ever been reprinted; and the publisher announced that he had withheld it from earlier issue for the same reasons as influenced Robinson.

The first authentic English text was that included by William Temple Franklin in his Memoirs, correspondence, and selections from the Works of Benjamin Franklin, London, 1817-18. The editor, to secure a fair copy of the autobiography for the printer, gave the original MS. to the then representative of Le Veillard, in exchange for the clean copy which Franklin had given to that friend, - the grandson not observing, at the time, that Franklin had added some pages to the original after the copy had been made for Le Veillard, and so accordingly the 1817 edition was deficient in these final pages. It long remained, however, the accepted English text, and is followed by Sparks. A third French version was made from this 1817 text, and appeared the next year in Paris, without name of translator, though it is attributed to M. de la Mardelle. It is called Mémoires sur la vie et les écrits de Benjamin Franklin, publiés sur le manuscrit original rédigé par lui-même en grande partie, et continué jusqu'à sa mort par W. T. Franklin (Paris, 1818). It made part of a translation of the entire work; but only 3 volumes, of which this was the first, were printed.

A fourth French version, Mémoires sur la vie de Benjamin Franklin, was published by Mons. A. C. Renouard in 1828. He seems to have had access to the original then in France, and the final pages omitted in the 1818 edition were given. Sparks does not seem to have been aware of these additional pages being known when, twenty years later, he published the 1818 text. In 1852 Henry Stevens examined the original manuscript at Amiens, but declined to pay the £600 for it which the owners then asked. These final pages seem to have escaped Laboulaye's notice, when

To render his edition as complete as possible, Sparks made special efforts to ferret out what unpublished material there was. He found various letters among the papers of Cadwallader Colden; others in the Logan MSS.; a few addressed to John Bartram the botanist; others sent to Jared Eliot, James Bowdoin, Mary Stevenson, Jonathan Williams, Samuel Franklin, Catharine Ray, Charles Thomson, and his sister, Jane Mecom. He also included for the first time a few letters to Lord Kames and David Hume, and the letters written from London by Franklin when the agent of Massachusetts.

A mass of correspondence between Franklin, Dr. Cooper, and Gov. Pownall, about the political symptoms which preceded the outbreak of the Revolution, was left in Boston by Dr. Cooper, and taken to England by Dr. Jeffries after the siege, and so found its way into the King's library, -a copy of which Sparks procured.1 The most important new material Sparks derived from papers which W. T. Franklin left behind in Philadelphia, when he went to England in 1790, with what he supposed to be the most valuable of his grandfather's papers. After being for fifty years undisturbed in the Fox mansion in Philadelphia, these papers were submitted to Sparks. They include what was saved of a mass of papers which Franklin left with Galloway when he went to France in 1776. These papers were either carried off or scattered about Galloway's house when the British evacuated Philadelphia in 1778, and those that could be gathered together were preserved by Bache and were finally added to the Fox collection. Thus it was that Sparks added about 650 pieces to the papers which had before constituted editions of Franklin's writings, and of these 460 had never before been printed. He adds that "many papers known to have once existed he had not been able to find." This was in 1840. It was not then known how large a proportion of the papers, which W. T. Franklin had taken to London, he had failed to embody in his edition of Franklin's works. There seems to have been some disagreement between Franklin's grandson and Colburn, his publisher, respecting the desired extent of the Works, and it was finally agreed that the venture should be made with three quarto volumes, and that it should rest dependent on the commercial success of the venture whether supplemental volumes should be issued. The public meanwhile was kept ignorant of any such contingent intention. When the grandson died in Paris in 1823, the rest of the manuscripts was locked in a chest and put on deposit in a banker's vault in London, and from thence his widow removed them, Sept. 27 of that same year. Sparks searched for them in vain in 1834, and was forced to supply their places as best he could from the French archives. The papers meanwhile were lying on the top shelf of an old tailor's shop in St. James's, in loose bundles, which included those which had already been in the printer's hands and those which had not. Just at the time Sparks finished his edition (1840), a gentleman in office under government recovered them and brought them to light, and from time to time offered them for sale in bulk to the British Museum, to Lord Palmerston, and to successive American ministers; but it was supposed that they had all been printed, and negotiations lagged. In 1851 they were offered to Abbott Lawrence, then the American minister, and the owner of them was referred to Henry Stevens, who soon bought the collection, and seeking Colburn, the publisher of the 1817 edition, who was then living, he learned the facts regarding the intended second instalment which the moderate success of the first had never prompted him to undertake, though there had been inducements to reissue, by substituting new titles, the edition of 1817 in 1833; and up to that time Colburn had not been able to trace the remaining manuscripts. The papers finally passed out of Henry Stevens' hands as security for a debt, and at this time his brother B. F. Stevens arranged them, undoing some arbitrary disarrangements of W. T. Franklin, and found the entire mass- - including a few added from other sources - to consist of 2938 documents, of which 2310 had never been printed. The 628 which had been printed were found to vary considerably from the print, and to be in some portions defective, particularly those which W. T. Franklin had edited, as he had worked with considerable license in his editing, and Franklin himself had the habit of altering his successive drafts before he gave his papers final shape in his press copies. Henry Stevens, who regained possession of them in 1881, reports that the collec

in 1866 he translated the text in Sparks's edition, and published his version in Paris. The latest issue is called Autobiographie: Traduction française par Ed. Laboulaye (Paris, 1887).

The next year the Hon. John Bigelow secured by purchase, for 25,000 francs, the original manuscript from its then owner, the representative of the widow Le Veillard, and, collating it with the 1818 edition, found numerous differences mostly of minor character - and observed the addition of the final pages. He printed the manuscript with close accuracy in 1868 at Philadelphia - thus giving the whole for the first time as Franklin wrote it under the title of the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, edited from his manuscript, with notes and an introduction, — the last tracing elaborately the history of its composition and the vicissitudes of its published form. (Cf. Dr. S. A. Green's Story of a famous book, Boston, 1871, originally in Atlantic Monthly, Feb., 1871, and H. Stevens's Franklin Collection.) Bigelow did not attempt to complete the story of Franklin's life, as Sparks and others had done; but later in 1874 (second ed. revised, 1879) he reissued the

autobiography, together with a continuation, produced by connecting together, in a chronological order, extracts from Franklin's letters and other writings to justify the title, Life of Franklin, written by himself, now first edited from original manuscripts and from his printed correspondence and other writings. In his third volume Bigelow gives a bibliography, based apparently upon Sabin, and there is an enumeration of the editions of the autobiography in the Catal. of works relating to Benj. Franklin in the Boston Public Library, p. 9. (Cf. Derby's Fifty Years among Authors, p. 676; Duyckinck, Cyclop. of Am. Lit., supplement, p. 142.) Bigelow has again reprinted the autobiography in the first volume of his Works of Franklin (1887). The most considerable life of Franklin, using the autobiography and other works as material, was The Life and Times of Benj. Franklin (1864) by James Parton. References to lesser characterizations will be found in Allibone (under Sparks and Franklin), Poole's Index, the Mem. Hist. of Boston, ii. 295, etc.

1 Cf. Sparks's ed. Franklin's Works (Boston edition), vii. 440, 475.