“He that wastes idly a groat’s worth of his time per day, one day with another, wastes the privilege of using one hundred pounds each day.

“He that idly loses five shillings’ worth of time loses five shillings, and might as prudently throw five shillings into the sea.

“He that loses five shillings, not only loses that sum, but all the advantages that might be made by turning it in dealing, which, by the time that a young man becomes old, will amount to a considerable sum of money.”

This may be, and has been characterized by some as, very worldly wisdom; but as Franklin himself has pointed out, it is a wisdom that lies necessarily at the root of much that is better and higher. It exhibits, moreover, only one phase of that general and practical wisdom with which he viewed every department of life, from the lowest to the highest.

Reference is made in the Autobiography to one or two of Franklin’s inventions, but nothing is said of the debt we owe to him in respect to the harmonica or musical glasses. He possessed considerable skill in music; and if he did not actually invent, he so far improved the harmonica as to develop it from a toy into an available instrument of music.

Franklin began to write the following account of his life in the form of a letter to his son, the Governor of New Jersey, in 1771, when on a visit to his friend, Dr. Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of St. Asaph. At this time he brought the Autobiography down to the period of his marriage. Nothing more was added until 1784, when he wrote another chapter while living at Passy. The remainder was written some four years later, at which time he had returned to Philadelphia, and was eighty-two years old.

While Franklin was in France as United States minister, he showed a copy of his Autobiography to some of his friends there, one of whom, M. Le Veillard, translated it into French. Shortly after Franklin’s death this translation was published in France. It was then retranslated into English and appeared in London, and was for a long time accepted both in England and the United States as though it were the author’s original work. Finally, however, the Autobiography was published by Franklin’s grandson, William Temple Franklin, from the original manuscript, and it is from this oopy, edited by Jared Sparks, that the present edition has been prepared.