h the boldest and
grandest discovery of his age.

Living thus in harmony with himself, he enjoyed the rare privilege of
living in equal harmony with the common mind and the advanced mind of
his contemporaries. He entered into every-day wants and feelings as if
he had never looked beyond them, and thus made himself the counsellor of
the people. He appreciated the higher wants and nobler aspirations of
our nature, and thus became the companion and friend of the philosopher.
His interest in the present--and it was a deep and active interest--did
not prevent him from looking forward with kindling sympathies to the
future. Like the diligent husbandman of whom Cicero tells us, he could
plant trees without expecting to see their fruit. If he detected folly
with a keen eye, he did not revile it with a bitter heart. Human
weakness, in his estimate of life, formed an inseparable part of human
nature, the extremes of virtue often becoming the starting-points of
vice,--better treated, all of them, by playful ridicule than by stern
reproof. He might never have gone with Howard in search of abuses, but
he would have drawn such pictures of those near home as would have made
some laugh and some blush and all unite heartily in doing away with
them. With nothing of the ascetic, he could impose self-denial and bear
it. Like Erasmus, he may not have aspired to become a martyr,--but in
those long voyages and journeys, which, in his infirm old age, he
undertook in his country's service, there was much of the sublimest
spirit of martyrdom. His philosophy, a philosophy of observation and
induction, had taught him caution in the formation of opinions, and
candor in his judgments. With distinct ideas upon most subjects, he was
never so wedded to his own views as to think that all who did not see
things as he did must be wilfully blind. His justly tempered faculties
lost none of their serene activity or gentle philanthropy by age.
Hamilton himself, at thirty, did not labor with more earnestness in the
formation of the Constitution than Franklin at eighty-one; and as if in
solemn record of his own interpretation of it, his last public act, with
eternity full in view, was to head a memorial to Congress for the
abolition of the slave-trade.

That such a man should produce a strong impression upon the excitable
mind of France must be evident to every one who knows how excitable that
mind is. But to understand his public as well as his personal posit