shes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse,
and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the
volumes of Addison." His method of work was "to make short hints of the
sentiments in each sentence," lay these by for a few days, and then
having reconstructed the essay from his notes to compare his version
with the original. Sometimes he jumbled the collection of hints into
confusion and thus made a study of construction as well as of style; or
again he turned an essay into verse and after a while converted it back
into prose. And this we believe to be the true method of acquiring a
good style, more efficacious than any English course in Harvard
College.

At sixteen he was reading Locke "On Human Understanding,"--very strong
meat for a boy--and the Port Royal "Art of Thinking." From Xenophon's
"Memorable Things of Socrates" he acquired a lesson which he never
forgot and which he always esteemed of importance in his education.
This was the skillful assumption of ignorance or uncertainty in
dispute, the so-called "irony" of Socrates. At first he employed this
ironical method to trap his opponents into making unwary statements
that led to their confusion; and in this way he grew expert in
obtaining victories that, as he said, neither he nor his cause
deserved. Accordingly he afterwards gave up this form of sophistry and
only retained the habit of expressing himself in terms of modest
diffidence, always saying: He conceived or imagined such a thing to be
so, and never using the words _certainly_, _undoubtedly_, and the like.

Books, however, occupied but a small part of his life at this time.
After leaving school he was first made to assist his father in the
tallow-chandler business; but his distaste for this trade was so great
that his father, fearing the boy would run away to sea, began to look
about for other employment for him. He took the lad to see "joiners,
brick-layers, turners, braziers, etc., at their work," in order to
discover where the boy's inclination lay. And this event of his boyhood
he as an old man remembered, saying, that it had ever since been a
pleasure to him to see good workmen handle their tools, and adding that
it was useful to him in his business and science to have learned so
much in the way of handicraft. At length Benjamin's love of books
determined his occupation, and like many another famous author he was
set to the printing-press. In 1717 his brother James had