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THE

WORKS

OF

DR. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN:

CONSISTING OF

ESSAYS,

HUMOROUS, MORAL, AND LITERARY:

WITH HIS

LIFE, WRITTEN BY HIMSELF.

Stereotyped by J. A. JAMES.

HARTFORD.

S. ANDRUS AND SON.

1846.

PUBLIC LIBRARY 155747

ASTOR, LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS. 1899.

PREFACE.

As biography is a species of history, which records the lives and characters of remarkable persons, it consequently becomes an interesting subject, and is of general utility. It would be but fair to assert, that almost every civilized nation on the globe has, at one period or other, produced distinguished individuals in various stations of life.

Mr. Jefferson, the President of the United States of America, in his "Notes on Virginia,” thus speaks,-in answer to the assertion of the Abbe Raynal, that America has not yet produced one good poet, one able mathematician, one man of genius, in a single art, or a single science,'- "When we shall have existed as a nation, as long as the Greeks did before they produced a Homer, the Romans a Virgil, the French a Racine and Voltaire, the English a Shakspeare and Milton, should this reproach be still true, we will inquire from what unfriendly causes it has proceeded, that the other countries of Europe and quarters of the earth shall not

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