on the deaths of two of the great statesmen of the middle period of our national history. These addresses, because they dealt with contemporary events and characters, are less impartial than the studies of the heroes of a past generation, but the sermons on John Quincy Adams and Daniel Webster were among the most famous and most widely circulated of Parker's public

utterances.

The lectures on the "Historic Americans " were prepared at a time when the agitation over slavery was at its height. The two sermons here added dealt with the careers of men actively engaged in the discussion of the great issue of the hour. The slavery question entered into Parker's every estimate of all these public leaders. A failure to assent to his opinion on that absorbing issue was to Parker nothing less than moral delinquency. George William Curtis once told of Charles Sumner a story which might have been true of Parker. "Once," he said, "when I argued with him that his opponents might be sincere and that there was some reason on the other side, he thundered, 'Upon such a question there is no other side.'" Parker saw so clearly the immediate and dreadful evil of slavery that he was sometimes led into unjust condemnation of men, quite as patriotic and as tender-hearted as himself, who felt that national disruption might be even a greater evil or who proposed other solutions of the problem than that championed by the Abolitionists.

Parker was much given to italicizing and capitalizing important words in his books and manuscripts. His points did not really need such emphasis and in this edition the italics are omitted. By ample learning, by lucid speech, by intense moral earnestness, he both shaped and expressed the public opinion of those of his

fellow-citizens who were inclined to agree with him. The lectures and sermons contained in this volume illustrate the prodigious labor, the honesty of purpose, the brilliancy of style, and the uncompromising zeal for truth and righteousness which gave to Theodore Parker a great influence over the minds and hearts of his own generation and which make these biographical studies a permanent contribution to American literature. SAMUEL A. ELIOT.

I

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

At the beginning of the last century a hardy man, Josiah Franklin by name, born in England, the son of a blacksmith, himself a tallow-chandler, was living in a small house, in an obscure way, in Boston, then a colonial town of eight or ten thousand inhabitants, in the colony of Massachusetts Bay.

On the 17th of January, at the Blue Ball, in Hanover street, 1706,1 his tenth son was born into this world, and, it being Sunday, he was taken to the meeting-house and publicly baptized the same day, according to the common custom of those times; for then it was taught by the ministers that the devil watched about every cradle, ready to seize the souls of all babies dying before they got ecclesiastically sprinkled with water, and that the ceremony of baptism would save them from his clutches until they could discern good from evil. The minister had a wig on his head, and Geneva bands about his neck. There was no Bible upon the desk of the pulpit, and he thought it a sin to repeat the Lord's Prayer. When he said, "This child's name is Benjamin," how all those grim puritanic Bostonians looked on the tenth boy, the fifteenth child of the tallow-chandler! And prudent aunts doubtless wondered what he would do with such a family in those hard times. That little baby, humbly cradled, has turned out to be the greatest man that America ever bore in her bosom or set eyes upon. Beyond all question, as I think, Benjamin Franklin had

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