ranklin was from his youth up a leader, a lion in whatever circle he
entered, whether in the printing-house, the provincial Assemblies, as
agent in England, or as a courtier in France. There was no one too
eminent in science or literature, on either side of the Atlantic, not
to esteem his acquaintance a privilege. He was an honorary member of
every important scientific association in the world, and in friendly
correspondence with most of those who conferred upon those bodies any
distinction; and all this by force of a personal, not to say
planetary, attraction that no one brought within his sphere could long
resist.

Pretty much all of importance that we know of Franklin we gather from
his private correspondence. His contemporaries wrote or at least
printed very little about him; scarcely one of the multitude whose
names he embalmed in his 'Autobiography' ever printed a line about
him. All that we know of the later half of his life not covered by his
autobiography, we owe almost exclusively to his private and official
correspondence. Though reckoning among his warm friends and
correspondents such men as David Hume, Dr. Joseph Priestley, Dr.
Price, Lord Kames, Lord Chatham, Dr. Fothergill, Peter Collinson,
Edmund Burke, the Bishop of St. Asaph and his gifted daughters,
Voltaire, the habitues of the Helvetius salon, the Marquis de Segur,
the Count de Vergennes, his near neighbors De Chaumont and Le
Veillard, the _maire_ of Passy,--all that we learn of his
achievements, of his conversation, of his daily life, from these or
many other associates of only less prominence in the Old World, might
be written on a single foolscap sheet. Nor are we under much greater
obligations to his American friends. It is to his own letters (and
except his 'Autobiography,' he can hardly be said to have written
anything in any other than the epistolary form; and that was written
in the form of a letter to his son William, and most of it only began
to be published a quarter of a century after his death) that we must
turn to learn how full of interest and importance to mankind was this
last half-century of his life. Beyond keeping copies of his
correspondence, which his official character made a duty as well as a
necessity, he appears to have taken no precautions to insure the
posthumous fame to which his correspondence during that period was
destined to contribute so much. Hence, all the biographies--and they
are numberless--owe almost their en