Let us go back to the beginning, and see how this man made his way to his present unique position.  We owe his presence in this country, it seems, to Benjamin Franklin; and he first smelt printer’s ink in Boston, near the spot where young Ben Franklin blackened his fingers with it a hundred years before.  Born and reared on the northeastern coast of Scotland, in a Roman Catholic family of French origin, he has a French intellect and Scotch habits.  Frenchmen residing among us can seldom understand why this man should be odious, so French is he.  A French naval officer was once remonstrated with for having invited him to a ball given on board a ship of war in New York harbor.  “Why, what has he done?” inquired the officer.  “Has he committed murder?  Has he robbed, forged, or run away with somebody’s wife?” “No.”  “Why then should we not invite him?” “He is the editor of the New York Herald.”  “Ah!” exclaimed the Frenchman,—­“the Herald! it is a delightful paper,—­it reminds me of my gay Paris.”  This, however, was thirty years ago, when Bennett was almost as French as Voltaire.  He was a Frenchman also in this:  though discarding, in his youth, the doctrines of his Church, and laughing them to scorn in early manhood, he still maintained a kind of connection with the Catholic religion.  The whole of his power as a writer consists in his detection of the evil in things that are good, and of the falsehood in things that are true, and of the ridiculous in things that are important.  He began with the Roman Catholic Church,—­“the holy Roman Catholic Church,” as he once styled it,—­adding in a parenthesis, “all of us Catholics are devilish holy.”  Another French indication is, that his early tastes were romantic literature and political economy,—­a conjunction very common in France from the days of the “philosophers” to the present time.  During our times of financial collapse, we have noticed, among the nonsense which he daily poured forth, some gleams of a superior understanding of the fundamental laws of finance.  He appears to have understood 1837 and 1857 better than most of his contemporaries.

In a Catholic seminary he acquired the rudiments of knowledge, and advanced so far as to read Virgil.  He also picked up a little French and Spanish in early life.  The real instructors of his mind were Napoleon, Byron, and Scott.  It was their fame, however, as much as their works, that attracted and dazzled him.  It is a strange thing, but true, that one of the strongest desires of one of the least reputable of living men was, and is, to be admired and held in lasting honor by his fellow-men.  Nor has he now the least doubt that he deserves their admiration, and will have it.  In 1817, an edition of Franklin’s Autobiography was issued in Scotland.  It was his perusal of that little book that first directed his thoughts toward America, and which finally decided him to try his fortune in the New World.  In May, 1819, being then about twenty years of age, he landed at Halifax, with less than five pounds in his purse, without a friend on the Western Continent, and knowing no vocation except that of book-keeper.