while he enlarged his friendships, to which he was never indifferent.  Whatever he touched turned to gold.  His almanac was a mine of wealth; the sermons he printed, and the school-books he manufactured, sold equally well.  With constantly increasing prosperity, he kept a level head, and lived with simplicity over his shop,—­most business men lived over their shops, in both England and America at that period.  He got up early in the morning, worked nine or ten hours a day, spent his evenings in reading and study, and went to bed at ten, finding time to keep up his Latin, and to acquire French, Spanish, and Italian, to make social visits, and play chess, of which game he was extravagantly fond till he was eighty years old.  His income, from business and investments, was not far from ten thousand dollars a year,—­a large sum in those days, when there was not a millionaire in the whole country, except perhaps among the Virginia planters.  Franklin was not ambitious to acquire a large fortune; he only desired a competency on which he might withdraw to the pursuit of higher ends than printing books.  He had the profound conviction that great attainments in science or literature required easy and independent circumstances.  It is indeed possible for genius to surmount any obstacles, but how few men have reached fame as philosophers or historians or even poets without leisure and freedom from pecuniary cares!  I cannot recall a great history that has been written by a poor man in any age or country, unless he had a pension, or office of some kind, involving duties more or less nominal, which gave him both leisure and his daily bread,—­like Hume as a librarian in Edinburgh, or Neander as a professor in Berlin.

Franklin, after twenty years of assiduous business and fortunate investments, was able to retire on an income of about four thousand dollars a year, which in those times was a comfortable independence anywhere.  He retired with the universal respect of the community both as a business man and a man of culture.  Thus far his career was not extraordinary, not differing much from that of thousands of others in the mercantile history of this country, or any other country.  By industry, sagacity, and thrift he had simply surmounted the necessity of work, and had so improved his leisure hours by reading and study as to be on an intellectual equality with anybody in the most populous and wealthy city in the country.  Had he died before 1747 his name probably would not have descended to our times.  He would have had only a local reputation as a philanthropical, intelligent, and successful business man, a printer by trade, who could both write and talk well, but was not able to make a better speech on a public occasion than many others who had no pretension to fame.