Benjamin Franklin | Page 5

its subject as a copyright more sacred than any which rests upon mere statutory law. Such, however, has not been the case, and the narrative has been rehearsed over and over again till the American who is not familiar with it is indeed a curiosity. Yet no one of the subsequent narrators has justified his undertaking. Therefore because the tale has been told so often, and once has been told so well, and also in order that the stone which it is my lot to cast upon a cairn made up of so many failures may at least be only a small pebble, I shall get forward as speedily as possible to that point in Franklin's career where his important public services begin, at the same time commending every reader to turn again for further refreshment of his knowledge to those pages which might well have aroused the envy of Fielding and Defoe.
Franklin came from typical English stock. For three hundred years, perhaps for many centuries more, his ancestors lived on a small freehold at Ecton in Northamptonshire, and so far back as record or tradition ran the eldest son in each generation had been bred a blacksmith. But after the strange British fashion there was intertwined with this singular fixedness of ideas a stubborn independence in thinking, courageously exercised in times of peril. The Franklins were among the early Protestants, and held their faith unshaken by the terrors of the reign of Bloody Mary. By the end of Charles the Second's time they were non-conformists and attendants on conventicles; and about 1682 Josiah Franklin, seeking the peaceful exercise of his creed, migrated to Boston, Massachusetts. His first wife bore him seven children, and died. Not satisfied, he took in second nuptials Abiah Folger, "daughter of Peter Folger, one of the first settlers of New England, of whom honorable mention is made by Cotton Mather," and justly, since in those dark days he was an active philanthropist towards the Indians, and an opponent of religious persecution.[1] This lady outdid her predecessor, contributing no less than ten children to expand the family circle. The eighth of this second brood was named Benjamin, in memory of his father's favorite brother. He was born in a house on Milk Street, opposite the Old South Church, January 6, old style, 17, new style, 1706. Mr. Parton says that probably Benjamin "derived from his mother the fashion of his body and the cast of his countenance. There are lineal descendants of Peter Folger who strikingly resemble Franklin in these particulars; one of whom, a banker of New Orleans, looks like a portrait of Dr. Franklin stepped out of its frame."[2] A more important inheritance was that of the humane and liberal traits of his mother's father.
[Note 1: Parton's Life of Franklin, i. 27.]
[Note 2: Ibid. i. 31.]
In that young, scrambling village in the new country, where all material, human or otherwise, was roughly and promptly utilized, the unproductive period of boyhood was cut very short. Franklin's father speedily resolved to devote him, "as the tithe of his sons, to the service of the church," and so sent him to the grammar school. A droller misfit than Franklin in an orthodox New England pulpit of that era can hardly be imagined; but since he was only seven years old when his father endeavored to arrange his life's career, a misappreciation of his fitnesses was not surprising. The boy himself had the natural hankering of children bred in a seaboard town for the life of a sailor. It is amusing to fancy the discussions between this babe of seven years and his father, concerning his occupation in life. Certainly the babe had not altogether the worst of it, for when he was eight years old his father definitively gave up the notion of making him a preacher of the Gospel. At the ripe age of ten he was taken from school, and set to assist his father in the trade of tallow-chandler and soap-boiler. But dipping wicks and pouring grease pleased him hardly better than reconciling infant damnation and a red-hot hell with the loveliness of Christianity. The lad remained discontented. His chief taste seemed to be for reading, and great were the ingenuity and the self-sacrifice whereby he secured books and leisure to read them. The resultant of these several forces was at last a suggestion from his father that he should take up, as a sort of quasi-literary occupation, the trade of a printer. James Franklin, an older brother of Benjamin, was already of that calling. Benjamin stood out for some time, but at last reluctantly yielded, and in the maturity of his thirteenth year this child set his hand to an indenture of apprenticeship which formally bound him to his brother for the next