



Produced by Tom Cosmas (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Archive)









FRANKLIN.

A SKETCH


JOHN BIGELOW.


Price 25 Cents]




FRANKLIN

A SKETCH.


BY JOHN BIGELOW.




BOSTON: LITTLE, BROWN, & CO.

1879.




Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1878, by

LITTLE, BROWN, & COMPANY,

in the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.




FRANKLIN.


Franklin, Benjamin (1706-1790), one of the most eminent journalists,
diplomatists, statesmen, and philosophers of his time, was born in the
city of Boston, and in the colony of Massachusetts Bay, on the 17th of
January 1706. He was the youngest of ten children, and the youngest son
for five consecutive generations. His father, who was born at Ecton, in
Northamptonshire, England, where the family may be traced back for some
four centuries, married young, and emigrated to America with three
children in 1682, From his parents, who never knew any illness save that
of which they died (the father at eighty and the mother at eighty-five),
he inherited an excellent constitution, and a good share of those heroic
mental and moral qualities by which a good constitution is preserved. In
his eighth year Benjamin, who never could remember when he did not know