The Autobiography of Ben Franklin | Page 8

by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try'd to
compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at
length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable
words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator with
the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them. But I
found I wanted a stock of words, or a readiness in recollecting and
using them, which I thought I should have acquired before that time if I
had gone on making verses; since the continual occasion for words of
the same import, but of different length, to suit the measure, or of
different sound for the rhyme, would have laid me under a constant
necessity of searching for variety, and also have tended to fix that
variety in my mind, and make me master of it. Therefore I took some of
the tales and turned them into verse; and, after a time, when I had pretty
well forgotten the prose, turned them back again. I also sometimes

jumbled my collections of hints into confusion, and after some weeks
endeavored to reduce them into the best order, before I began to form
the full sentences and compleat the paper. This was to teach me method
in the arrangement of thoughts. By comparing my work afterwards
with the original, I discovered many faults and amended them; but I
sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of
small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the
language, and this encouraged me to think I might possibly in time
come to be a tolerable English writer, of which I was extremely
ambitious. My time for these exercises and for reading was at night,
after work or before it began in the morning, or on Sundays, when I
contrived to be in the printing-house alone, evading as much as I could
the common attendance on public worship which my father used to
exact on me when I was under his care, and which indeed I still thought
a duty, though I could not, as it seemed to me, afford time to practise it.
When about 16 years of age I happened to meet with a book, written by
one Tryon, recommending a vegetable diet. I determined to go into it.
My brother, being yet unmarried, did not keep house, but boarded
himself and his apprentices in another family. My refusing to eat flesh
occasioned an inconveniency, and I was frequently chid for my
singularity. I made myself acquainted with Tryon's manner of preparing
some of his dishes, such as boiling potatoes or rice, making hasty
pudding, and a few others, and then proposed to my brother, that if he
would give me, weekly, half the money he paid for my board, I would
board myself. He instantly agreed to it, and I presently found that I
could save half what he paid me. This was an additional fund for
buying books. But I had another advantage in it. My brother and the
rest going from the printing-house to their meals, I remained there
alone, and, despatching presently my light repast, which often was no
more than a bisket or a slice of bread, a handful of raisins or a tart from
the pastry-cook's, and a glass of water, had the rest of the time till their
return for study, in which I made the greater progress, from that greater
clearness of head and quicker apprehension which usually attend
temperance in eating and drinking.
And now it was that, being on some occasion made asham'd of my

ignorance in figures, which I had twice failed in learning when at
school, I took Cocker's book of Arithmetick, and went through the
whole by myself with great ease. I also read Seller's and Shermy's
books of Navigation, and became acquainted with the little geometry
they contain; but never proceeded far in that science. And I read about
this time Locke On Human Understanding, and the Art of Thinking, by
Messrs. du Port Royal.
While I was intent on improving my language, I met with an English
grammar (I think it was Greenwood's), at the end of which there were
two little sketches of the arts of rhetoric and logic, the latter finishing
with a specimen of a dispute in the Socratic method; and soon after I
procur'd Xenophon's Memorable Things of Socrates, wherein there are
many instances of the same method. I was charm'd with it, adopted it,
dropt my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, and put on
the humble inquirer and doubter. And being then, from reading
Shaftesbury and Collins, become a real doubter in many points of our
religious doctrine, I found this method safest for myself and very
embarrassing to