Page:The True Benjamin Franklin.djvu/55

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EDUCATION men of eminence have been quite numerous in America for a hundred years. Frank- lin was our first hero of this kind, and I am inclined to think our greatest The others have achieved wealth or political importance ; sometimes both. But Franklin achieved not only wealth and the reputa- tion of a diplomatist and a statesman, but made him- self a most accomplished scholar, a man of letters of world-wide fame, a philosopher of no small im- portance, and as an investigator and discoverer in science he certainly enlarged the domain of human knowledge. His father, Josiah Franklin, an industrious candle- maker in Boston, intended that his youngest son, Benjamin, should enter the ministry of the Puritan Church. With this end in view he sent him, when eight years old, to the Boston Grammar-School ; but before a year had expired he found that the cost of even this slight schooling was too much for the slender means with which he had to provide for a large family of children. So Franklin went to another school, kept by one George Brownell, where he stayed for about a year, and then his school-days were ended forever. He entered his father's shop to cut wicks and melt tallow. During his two years of 41