e of the most influential in the
world. Its "proverbial sentences, chiefly such as inculcated industry
and frugality as the means of procuring wealth and thereby securing
virtue," were sown like seed all over the land. The almanac went year
after year, for quarter of a century, into the house of nearly every
shopkeeper, planter, and farmer in the American provinces. Its wit and
humor, its practical tone, its shrewd maxims, its worldly honesty, its
morality of common sense, its useful information, all chimed well with
the national character. It formulated in homely phrase and with droll
illustration what the colonists more vaguely knew, felt, and believed
upon a thousand points of life and conduct. In so doing it greatly
trained and invigorated the natural mental traits of the people. "Poor
Richard" was the revered and popular schoolmaster of a young nation
during its period of tutelage. His teachings are among the powerful
forces which have gone to shaping the habits of Americans. His terse and
picturesque bits of the wisdom and the virtue of this world are familiar
in our mouths to-day; they moulded our great-grandparents and their
children; they have informed our popular traditions; they still
influence our actions, guide our ways of thinking, and establish our
points of view, with the constant control of acquired habits which we
little suspect. If we were accustomed still to read the literature of
the almanac, we should be charmed with its humor. The world has not yet
grown away from it, nor ever will. Addison and Steele had more polish
but vastly less humor than Franklin. "Poor Richard" has found eternal
life by passing into the daily speech of the people, while the
"Spectator" is fast being crowded out of the hands of all save scholars
in literature. At this period of his life he wrote many short fugitive
pieces, which hold some of the rarest wit that an American library
contains. Few people suspect that the ten serious and grave-looking
octavos, imprinted "The Works of Benjamin Franklin," hide much of that
delightful kind of wit that can never grow old, but is as charming
to-day as when it came damp from the press a century and more ago. How
much of "Poor Richard" was actually original is a sifting not worth
while to make. Franklin said: "I was conscious that not a tenth part of
the wisdom was my own which he ascribed to me, but rather the gleanings
that I had made of the sense of all ages and nations." No profound