translator of the first French edition? Where did he get his copy? Why did William Temple Franklin delay the publication for twenty-seven years? Did he or the corrector of the press attempt the emasculation of the autobiographer's style? The answers to these and many similar questions will lie hid in the backward of time until some acute and patient investigator has the fortune to find some forgotten scrap of manuscript, some unregarded paragraph, that will shoot a sudden shaft of light to the heart of the maze. Yet such questions are of little moment save for the specialist. What is of permanent importance to the world is that the Autobiography has been restored to its true and uncorrupted text,1 wherein we may delightfully learn to know the finest example in history of the self-made man - the ideal type of the wisely humorous philosopher of things as they are, incarnated in a human personality at once ripe, various, charming, sound, unique. The only exception is the omission of four short passages which were not written virginibus puerisque. TWYFORD, at the Bishop of St. Asaph's, 1771. DEAR SON: I have ever had pleasure in obtaining any little anecdotes of my ancestors. You may remember the inquiries I made among the remains of my relations when you were with me in England, and the journey I undertook for that purpose. Imagining it may be equally agreeable to you to know the circumstances of my life, many of which you are yet unacquainted with, and expecting the enjoyment of a week's uninterrupted leisure in my present country retirement, I sit down to write them for you. To which I have besides some other inducements. Having emerged from the poverty and obscurity in which I was born and bred, to a state of affluence and some degree of reputation in the world, and having gone so far through life with a considerable share of fe licity, the conducing means I made use of, which with the blessing of God so well succeeded, my posterity may like to know, as they may find some of them suitable to their own situations, and therefore fit to be imitated. That felicity, when I reflected on it, has induced me sometimes to say, that were it offered to my choice, I should have no objection to a repetition of the same life from its beginning, only asking the advantages authors have in a second edition to correct some faults of the first. So I might, besides correcting the faults, change some sinister accidents and events of it for others more favourable. But though this were denied, I should still accept the offer. Since such a repetition is not to be expected, the next thing most like living one's life over again seems to be a recollection of that life, and to make that recollection as durable as possible by putting it down in writing. Hereby, too, I shall indulge the inclination so natural in old men, to be talking of themselves and their own past actions; and I shall indulge it without being tiresome to others, who, through respect to age, might conceive themselves obliged to give me a hearing, since this may be read or not as any one pleases. And, lastly (I may as well con |