He was sure of a good audience every
night, if his performance opened before the younger children retired.
There is no doubt that this custom exerted a molding influence upon
the household, although the music might have been like Uncle
Benjamin's poetry, as compared with the music of our day.
For the reader, now familiar with the manners, customs, rush of business,
inventions, wealth, and fashion of our day, it is difficult to understand
the state of society at the time of Franklin's birth. Parton says of it:
"1706, the year of Benjamin Franklin's birth, was the fourth of the
reign of Queen Anne, and the year of Marlborough's victory at Ramillies.
Pope was then a sickly dwarf, four feet high and nineteen years of age,
writing, at his father's cottage in Windsor Forest the 'Pastorals'
which, in 1709, gave him his first celebrity. Voltaire was a boy of ten,
in his native village near Paris. Bolingbroke was a rising young member
of the House of Commons, noted, like Fox at a later day, for his
dissipation and his oratory. Addison, aged thirty-four, had written his
Italian travels, but not the 'Spectator' and was a thriving politician.
Newton, at sixty-four, his great work all done, was master of the mint,
had been knighted the year before, and elected president of the Royal
Society in 1703 Louis XIV was king of France, and the first king of
Prussia was reigning.
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