_Ben taken from school, turns his own teacher--History of the books
which he first read--Is bound to the printing trade._
At a learned table in Paris, where Dr. Franklin happened to dine, it
was asked by the abbe Raynal, _What description of men most deserves
pity?_
Some mentioned one character, and some another. When it came to
Franklin's turn, he replied, _A lonesome man in a rainy day, who does
not know how to read._
As every thing is interesting that relates to one who made such a
figure in the world, it may gratify our readers to be told what were
the books that first regaled the youthful appetite of the great Dr.
Franklin. The state of literature in Boston at that time, being like
himself, only in its infancy, it is not to be supposed that Ben had
any very great choice of books. Books, however, there always were in
Boston.[1] Among these was Bunyan's Voyages, which appears to have
been the first he ever read, and of which he speaks with great
pleasure. But there is reason to fear that Bunyan did no good: for, as
it was the reading of the life of Alexander the Great that first set
Charles the Twelfth in such a fever to be running over the world
killing every body he met; so, in all probability, it was Bunyan's
Voyages that fired Ben's fancy with that passion for travelling, which
gave his father so much uneasiness. Having read over old Bunyan so
often as to have him almost by heart, Ben added a little boot, and
made a _swap_ of him for _Burton's Historical Miscellanies_. This,
consisting of forty or fifty volumes, held him a good long tug: for he
had no time to read but on Sundays, and early in the morning or late
at night. After this he fell upon his father's library. This being
made up principally of old puritanical divinity, would to most boys
have appeared like the pillars of Hercules to travellers of old--a
bound not to be passed. But so keen was Ben's appetite for any thing
in the shape of a book, that he fell upon it with his usual voracity,
and soon devoured every thing in it, especially of the lighter sort.
Seeing a little bundle of something crammed away very snugly upon an
upper shelf, his curiosity led him to take it down: and lo! what
should it be but "_Plutarch's Lives_." Ben was a stranger to the work;
but the title alone was enough for him; he instantly gave it one
reading; and then a second, and a third, and so on until he had almost
committed it to memory; and to his dying day he never mentioned the
name of Plutarch without acknowledging how much pleasure and profit he
had derived from that divine old writer. And there was another book,
by Defoe, a small affair, entitled "_An Essay on Projects_," to which
he pays the very high compliment of saying, that "_from it he received
impressions which influenced some of the principal events of his
life_."
[1] You never find presbyterians without books.
Happy now to find that books had the charm to keep his darling boy at
home, and thinking that if he were put into a printing office he would
be sure to get books enough, his father determined to make a printer
of him, though he already had a son in that business. Exactly to his
wishes, that son, whose name was James, had just returned from London
with a new press and types. Accordingly, without loss of time, Ben,
now in his twelfth year, was bound apprentice to him. By the
indentures Ben was to serve his brother till twenty-one, _i.e._ _nine_
full years, without receiving one penny of wages save for the last
twelve months! How a man pretending to religion could reconcile it to
himself to make so hard a bargain with a younger brother, is strange.
But perhaps it was permitted of God, that Ben should learn his ideas
of oppression, not from reading but from suffering. The deliverers of
mankind have all been made perfect through suffering. And to the
galling sense of this villanous oppression, which never ceased to
rankle on the mind of Franklin, the American people owe much of that
spirited resistance to British injustice, which eventuated in their
liberties. But Master James had no great cause to boast of this
selfish treatment of his younger brother Benjamin; for the old adage
"foul play never thrives," was hardly ever more remarkably illustrated
than in this affair, as the reader will in due season be brought to
understand.