d confidence while he
enlarged his friendships, to which he was never indifferent. Whatever he
touched turned to gold. His almanac was a mine of wealth; the sermons he
printed, and the school-books he manufactured, sold equally well. With
constantly increasing prosperity, he kept a level head, and lived with
simplicity over his shop,--most business men lived over their shops, in
both England and America at that period. He got up early in the morning,
worked nine or ten hours a day, spent his evenings in reading and study,
and went to bed at ten, finding time to keep up his Latin, and to
acquire French, Spanish, and Italian, to make social visits, and play
chess, of which game he was extravagantly fond till he was eighty years
old. His income, from business and investments, was not far from ten
thousand dollars a year,--a large sum in those days, when there was not
a millionaire in the whole country, except perhaps among the Virginia
planters. Franklin was not ambitious to acquire a large fortune; he
only desired a competency on which he might withdraw to the pursuit of
higher ends than printing books. He had the profound conviction that
great attainments in science or literature required easy and independent
circumstances. It is indeed possible for genius to surmount any
obstacles, but how few men have reached fame as philosophers or
historians or even poets without leisure and freedom from pecuniary
cares! I cannot recall a great history that has been written by a poor
man in any age or country, unless he had a pension, or office of some
kind, involving duties more or less nominal, which gave him both leisure
and his daily bread,--like Hume as a librarian in Edinburgh, or Neander
as a professor in Berlin.

Franklin, after twenty years of assiduous business and fortunate
investments, was able to retire on an income of about four thousand
dollars a year, which in those times was a comfortable independence
anywhere. He retired with the universal respect of the community both as
a business man and a man of culture. Thus far his career was not
extraordinary, not differing much from that of thousands of others in
the mercantile history of this country, or any other country. By
industry, sagacity, and thrift he had simply surmounted the necessity of
work, and had so improved his leisure hours by reading and study as to
be on an intellectual equality with anybody in the most populous and
wealthy city in the country. Had he die