ond-rate form of prudential mind. Nevertheless, there must have been some reason for the printerembassador's "Poor Richardism;" say it was organization, temperament, or idiosyncrasy, if you will, that made him the man he was; still the replication to such a plea is, that even these are now acknowledged to be more or less derivative qualities, in which the family type is often found either exaggerated into genius or dwarfed into idiocy. Hence it is believed that no very great historic violence has been committed here in making a member of the Franklin family the father of Benjamin Franklin's character, even as his parents were assuredly the progenitors of his "lithiasis." Moreover, Uncle Benjamin was his godfather, and that in the days when godfathership was regarded as a far different duty (the duty of moral and religious supervision) from the mere bit of silver-spoon-and-fork-odand that it is now. Again, from the printer's own description of the character of his uncle, it is plain that Uncle Ben was not the man to ignore any duty he had taken upon himself. Besides, the old man lived in the house with Benjamin's father, and had himself only one son (who was grown up and settled as a cutler in the town); so that, as the uncle was comparatively childless, it has been presumed that the instinctive fondness of age for youth might have led the old boy to be taken with the budding intellect and principles of his little nephew and namesake, and thus to have exceeded his

sponsorial duties so far as to have become the boy's best friend and counselor, loving him like a son, and training him like a novice. Farther we know that Uncle Benjamin was a man of some observation and learning; he appears also to have been a person of considerable leisure, and perhaps of some little means (for we do not hear of his following any occupation in America); so that, when we remember how slight is the addition that even the profoundest geniuses make to the knowledge-fund of the world, and how little advance those who take even the longest strides make upon such as have gone before them, we can not but admit that Franklin must have got the substratum of his knowledge and principles somewhere since, born under different circumstances, he would have been a wholly different man. Surely, then, there is no great offense offered to truth in endeavoring to explain artistically how Benjamin Franklin became the man he was, nor any great wrong done to history in using Uncle Ben as the means of making out to youths what was the peculiar "Old Richard" philosophy that distinguished the printer-sage in after life. The main object was to give the young reader a sense of the early teachings Benjamin Franklin when a boy might have received (and doubtlessly did receive) from his old Non-conformist uncle, and accordingly the latter has been made, if not the virtual hero, at least the prime mover of the incidents in the present book.

British jails a century and a half ago would have been following in the track of the pernicious French school of literature, where every thing is sacrificed to melodramatic intensity, and which is forever striving to excite a spasm rather than gratify a taste.

The genius of true English landscape painting, on the contrary, is "repose;" and the genius of modern English poetry is "repose" too-a kind of Sabbath feeling which turns the heart from the grossnesses and vanities of human life, and lets the work-day spirit loose among the quiet, shady, and healthful beauties of nature. The intense school and the repose school are the two far-distant extremes of all art, and they differ as much from each other as the sweet refreshment of an evening by one's own fireside does from the heated stimulus of a tavern debauch.

For these artistic reasons, then, the dead bones of the old jail iniquities and cruelties have not been disinterred and set up as a bugaboo here. Such a picture might have been true to the time, but mere literal truth is a poor thing after all. Why, Gustave le Gray's wonderful photograph of the Sunlight on the Sea, that is hanging before our eyes as we write, is as true as "Mangnall's Questions ;" and yet what a picturesque barbarism, and even falsity it is! It no more renders what only human genius can seize and paint-the expression, the feeling, the soul of such a scenethan the camera obscura can fac-simile the human