Note 92 — § 4. IN PHILADELPHIA AND IN BUSINESS FOR HIMSELF.
Reading edition
[81] This method of expression was adopted on the reformation of the calendar in England in 1752. It shows in this case that the February was of the year 1726 according to the old style, and 1727 according to the new calendar. The year 1751 began on the 25th of March, the former New-Year's Day, and ended, by act of Parliament, at the 1st of January, 1752.
[82] Declared by word of mouth, not written.
[83] Those who were unable to pay for their passage by ship from one country to another, sometimes sold their service for a term of years to the captain who brought them over.
[84] Bound by articles of apprenticeship.
[85] The guinea contains twenty-one shillings, while the pound has twenty.
[86] A crimp is one who brings recruits to the army or sailors to ships by false inducements.
[87] Molds.
[88] Here used for salesman.
[89] Marks or registers by which a bill may be identified.
[90] See Note 14, p. 19.
[91] Belief in the existence of a personal God, but denying revelation.
[92]
"Whatever is, is in its causes just, Since all things are by fate. But purblind man Sees but a part o' the chain, the nearest links; His eyes not carrying to the equal beam That poises all above."
Dryden, [OE]dipus, act iii. sc. I.
[93] The word means an assembly of persons engaged for a common purpose. It is from the Spanish junta ("a council").
[94] An instrument used in navigation for measuring the altitude of the sun.
[95] Putting the types no longer needed for printing into the proper boxes.
[96] Set up for printing.
[97] Type in a jumbled mass.
[98] "This paper was called The Universal Instructor in all Arts and Sciences and Pennsylvania Gazette. Keimer printed his last number—the thirty-ninth—on the twenty-fifth day of September, 1729."—Bigelow.
[99] The governor brought instructions from the king that his salary should be one thousand pounds. The legislature claimed the liberty of fixing the sum themselves. Franklin ended his article with this sentence: "Their happy mother country will perhaps observe with pleasure that, though her gallant cocks and matchless dogs abate their natural fire and intrepidity when transported to a foreign clime (as this nation is), yet her sons in the remotest part of the earth, and even to the third and fourth descent, still retain that ardent spirit of liberty, and that undaunted courage, which has in every age so gloriously distinguished Britons and Englishmen from the rest of mankind."
[100] Franklin's Note.—I got his son once five hundred pounds.
[101] This money had not the full value of the pound sterling.
[102] That is, the government of Delaware.
[103] In secret.
[104] Men on horseback who carried the mail.
[105] Miss Read's first marriage.
[106] Mrs. Franklin died Dec. 19, 1774. Franklin celebrated his wife in a song, of which the following verses are a part:
"Of their Chloes and Phyllises poets may prate, I sing my plain country Joan, These twelve years my wife, still the joy of my life, Blest day that I made her my own. "Am I loaded with care, she takes off a large share, That the burden ne'er makes me to reel; Does good fortune arrive, the joy of my wife Quite doubles the pleasure I feel. "Some faults have we all, and so has my Joan, But then they're exceedingly small; And, now I'm grown used to them, so like my own, I scarcely can see them at all. "Were the finest young princess with millions in purse, To be had in exchange for my Joan, I could not get better wife, might get a worse, So I'll stick to my dearest old Joan."
[107] Franklin's Memorandum.—Thus far was written with the intention expressed in the beginning, and therefore contains several little family anecdotes of no importance to others. What follows was written many years after in compliance with the advice contained in these letters (see p. 192), and accordingly intended for the public. The affairs of the Revolution occasioned the interruption.
[108] See Note 1.
[109] The Philadelphia Library was incorporated in 1742. In its building is a tablet which reads as follows:
Be it remembered, in honor of the Philadelphia youth (then chiefly artificers), that in MDCCXXXI. they cheerfully, at the instance of Benjamin Franklin, one of their number, instituted the Philadelphia Library, which, though small at first, is become highly valuable and extensively useful, and which the walls of this edifice are now destined to contain and preserve; the first stone of whose foundation was here placed the thirty-first day of August, 1789.
The inscription, save the mention of himself, was prepared by Franklin.
[110] See Prov. xxii. 29.