distinctions, we must realize how completely he represents the
secularizing tendencies of his age. What a drama of worldly
adventure it all was, this roving life of the tallow-chandler's
son, who runs away from home, walks the streets of Philadelphia
with the famous loaves of bread under his arm, is diligent in
business, slips over to London, where he gives lessons in
swimming and in total abstinence, slips back to Philadelphia and
becomes its leading citizen, fights the long battle of the
American colonies in London, sits in the Continental Congress,
sails to Europe to arrange that French Alliance which brought our
Revolution to a successful issue, and comes home at last, full of
years and honors, to a bland and philosophical exit from the
stage!

He broke with every Puritan tradition. The Franklins were
relatively late comers to New England. They sprang from a long
line of blacksmiths at Ecton in Northamptonshire. The seat of the
Washingtons was not far away, and Franklin's latest biographer
points out that the pink-coated huntsmen of the Washington gentry
may often have stopped at Ecton to have their horses shod at the
Franklin smithy. Benjamin's father came out in 1685, more than
fifty years after the most notable Puritan emigration. Young
Benjamin, born in 1706, was as untouched by the ardors of that
elder generation as he would have been by the visions of
Dante--an author, by the way, whom he never mentions, even as he
never mentions Shakespeare. He had no reverence for Puritan New
England. To its moral beauty, its fine severity, he was wholly
blind. As a boy he thriftily sold his Pilgrim's "Progress." He
became, in the new fashion of that day, a Deist. Like a true
child of the eighteenth century, his attitude toward the