The True Benjamin Franklin

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Fisher Sydney George. The True Benjamin Franklin

Preface

I. PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS

II. EDUCATION

III. RELIGION AND MORALS

IV. BUSINESS AND LITERATURE

V. SCIENCE

VI. THE PENNSYLVANIA POLITICIAN

VII. DIFFICULTIES AND FAILURE IN ENGLAND

VIII. AT HOME AGAIN

IX. THE EMBASSY TO FRANCE AND ITS SCANDALS

X. PLEASURES AND DIPLOMACY IN FRANCE

XI. THE CONSTITUTION-MAKER

Appendix to Page 104. FRANKLIN’S DAUGHTER, MRS. FOXCROFT

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Franklin was a rather large man, and is supposed to have been about five feet ten inches in height. In his youth he was stout, and in old age corpulent and heavy, with rounded shoulders. The portraits of him reveal a very vigorous-looking man, with a thick upper arm and a figure which, even in old age, was full and rounded. In fact, this rounded contour is his most striking characteristic, as the angular outline is the characteristic of Lincoln. Franklin’s figure was a series of harmonious curves, which make pictures of him always pleasing. These curves extended over his head and even to the lines of his face, softening the expression, slightly veiling the iron resolution, and entirely consistent with the wide sympathies, varied powers, infinite shrewdness, and vast experience which we know he possessed.

In his earliest portrait as a youth of twenty he looks as if his bones were large; but in later portraits this largeness of bone which he might have had from his Massachusetts origin is not so evident. He was, however, very muscular, and prided himself on it. When he was a young printer, as he tells us in his Autobiography, he could carry with ease a large form of letters in each hand up and down stairs. In his old age, when past eighty, he is described as insisting on lifting unaided heavy books and dictionaries to show the strength he still retained.

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Soon afterwards Franklin was carried in a litter by easy journeys from Paris to the sea-coast, and crossed to Southampton, England, to wait for the vessel that was to take him to Philadelphia. While at Southampton he says, —

It was certainly odd that in his seventy-ninth year and enfeebled by disease he should renew his youthful skill as a swimmer and justify to himself his favorite theory that nakedness and water are not the causes of colds.

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