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[55] and first printed in a Philadelphia newspaper. Later they were published in book form, with an introduction by Franklin, and had an astonishing popularity, not only in America, but in England, Ireland, and France. They were highly praised by such foreign critics as Voltaire and Burke, and their author was idolized at home until, as the Revolution approached, the public grew impatient of his temperate policy. He wished for constitutional liberty; they demanded independence. Thereafter probably the most influential pieces of Revolutionary prose, outside of documents, were Paine's Common sense, Hopkinson's The Battle of the Kegs, and Franklin's Examination relative to the Repeal of the Stamp Act.1 Such writing as this had greater flexibility, and therefore a more promising literary quality, than those pamphlets which Lord Chatham admired. The long series of volumes bearing the names of our early statesmen deal mainly with questions now past, and are rarely of interest to the modern reader.
1 The title is, in full, The examination of Doctor Benjamin Franklin, in the British house of Commons, relative to the Repeal of the American Stamp Act, in 1766. First published in London, 1767.
Boston, New York and Chicago. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903.
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