Part 20
You will be interested in following Franklin's experiments in determining the value of oil in stilling the waves, and also his investigations of the Gulf Stream and of the nature of storms. He asked, "What signifies philosophy that does not apply to some use?" Yet he had a wonderful imagination back of his practical nature.
Emerson says that the chief use of a book is to inspire. On this basis how do you rank the _Autobiography_ in usefulness?
ECLECTIC ENGLISH CLASSICS
=Addison's= Sir Roger de Coverley Papers (Underwood)
=Arnold's= Sohrab and Rustum (Tanner)
=Bunyan's= Pilgrim's Progress (Jones and Arnold)
=Burke's= Conciliation with America (Clark) Speeches at Bristol (Bergin)
=Burns's= Poems--Selections (Venable)
=Byron's= Childe Harold (Canto IV), Prisoner of Chillon, Mazeppa, and other Selections (Venable)
=Carlyle's= Essay on Burns (Miller)
=Chaucer's= Prologue and Knighte's Tale (Van Dyke)
=Coleridge's= Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Garrigues)
=Cooper's= Pilot (Watrous) The Spy (Barnes)
=Defoe's= History of the Plague in London (Syle) Robinson Crusoe (Stephens)
=De Quincey's= Revolt of the Tartars
=Dickens's= Christmas Carol and Cricket on the Hearth (Wannamaker) Tale of Two Cities (Pearce)
=Dryden's= Palamon and Arcite (Bates)
=Eliot's= Silas Marner (McKitrick)
=Emerson's= American Scholar, Self-Reliance, Compensation (Smith)
=Franklin's= Autobiography (Reid)
=Goldsmith's= Vicar of Wakefield (Hansen) Deserted Village (See Gray's Elegy)
=Gray's= Elegy in a Country Churchyard, and =Goldsmith's= Deserted Village (Van Dyke)
=Hughes's= Tom Brown's School Days (Gosling).
=Irving's= Sketch Book--Selections (St. John) Tales of a Traveler (Rutland)
=Lincoln's= Addresses and Letters (Moores) Address at Cooper Union (See =Macaulay's= Speeches on Copyright)
=Macaulay's= Essay on Addison (Matthews) Essay on Milton (Mead) Essays on Lord Clive and Warren Hastings (Holmes) Lays of Ancient Rome and other Poems (Atkinson) Life of Johnson (Lucas) Speeches on Copyright, and Lincoln's Address at Cooper Union (Pittenger)
=Milton's= L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas (Buck) Paradise Lost. Books I and II (Stephens)
=Old Ballads= (Morton).
=Old Testament Narratives= (Baldwin)
=Poe's= Selected Poems and Tales (Stott)
=Pope's= Homer's Iliad. Books I, VI, XXII, and XXIV Rape of the Lock and Essay on Man (Van Dyke)
=Ruskin's= Sesame and Lilies (Rounds)
=Scott's= Abbot Ivanhoe (Schreiber) Lady of the Lake (Bacon) Marmion (Coblentz) Quentin Durward (Norris) Woodstock
=Shakespeare's= As You Like It (North) Hamlet (Shower) Henry V (Law) Julius Cæsar (Baker) Macbeth (Livengood) Merchant of Venice (Blakely) Midsummer Night's Bream (Haney) The Tempest (Barley) Twelfth Night (Weld)
=Southey's= Life of Nelson
=Stevenson's= Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey (Armstrong) Treasure Island (Fairley)
=Swift's= Gulliver's Travels (Gaston)
=Tennyson's= Idylls of the King--Selections (Willard) Princess (Shryock)
=Thackeray's= Henry Esmond (Bissell)
=Washington's= Farewell Address, and =Webster's= First Bunker Hill Oration (Lewis)
=Webster's= Bunker Hill Orations (See also Washington's Farewell Address)
=Wordsworth's= Poems--Selections (Venable)
Transcriber's Note
* Obvious punctuation and spelling errors repaired.
* Footnotes moved to the end of the appropriate chapters.
* Text enclosed between equal signs was in bold face in the original (=bold=).
* Notes [n] are at the end of the book as originally published.
End of Project Gutenberg's Franklin's Autobiography, by Benjamin Franklin