Modern achievement Author:Edward Everett Hale Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: extraordinary throughout the civilized world. This prosperity and fame had no ill effect upon the subject of it. Sagacity, sound common sense, and energy were th... more »e features that, above all, distinguished the character of Franklin. Franklin's last printed essay appeared in the " Federal Gazette" of March 1789, and was signed " Historicus." After a short illness he died April 17, 1790, at the age of eighty-four. Franklin made various bequests and donations to cities, public bodies, and individuals. Among his papers, written when he was but twenty-three years of age, was found this original epitaph:— The Body of BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, Printer, (Like the Cover of an Old Book, Its Contents torn out And Stripped of its Lettering and Gilding) Lies Here Food for Worms; Yet the Work Itself Shall Not be Lost, For It will (as he believed) appear once more in a New and More Beautiful Edition Corrected and Amended By The Author. Franklin shook the dust of England from his feet (says an English writer) as a subject of King George, when he set sail for America in 1775. When he returned to Europe, it was to watch and to baffle from Passy the clumsy efforts of British ministers to make a solitude where they had failed to maintain peace. He was so far a diplomatist that he had studied human character for seventy years. Yet in England his diplomacy had only exasperated. In France he accomplished as much against England as Washington with all his victories. His knowledge of French was so indifferent that on one occasion, during the sitting of the Academy, he was observed to " applaud the loudest at his own praises." He did the work, but he never learned the dialect of diplomacy. He was that strange creature—a republican at the court of a pure monarchy. In Paris ...« less