1901.] R03ENGARTES — FRANKLIN'S BAGATELLES. 121 



Franklin's Bagatelles. 



The American Philosophical Society is the owner of seventy-six 

 folio volumes of the papers of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin by his 

 will left all his books, manuscripts and papers to his grandson, 

 William Temple Franklin. Bigelow, in his Life of Franklin, prints 

 the will (Vol. 3, p. 476) and (p. 466) a letter from William 

 Temple Franklin, dated Philadelphia, May 22, 1790, to M. Le 

 Veillard, of Paris, the intimate friend of Franklin, advising him 

 of his grandfather's bequest. Later Temple Franklin returned to 

 Europe, living in London and Paris, and dying in London in 

 1823, and by his will leaving to his friend, Charles Fox, of Philadel- 

 phia, all the Franklin papers in this country. These papers had 

 been for many years stored in the barn at Mr. Fox's country seat 

 at Champlost, near Philadelphia. His son presented them to the 

 Philosophical Society some sixty years ago, and here they have been 

 kept ever since. 



Many of them were bound up in a pretty rough way, each 

 volume prefaced with a rough alphabetical reference list ; many of 

 them were left in the original packages, bundles with little other 

 than a crude chronological order, until quite recently our librarian, 

 Dr. Hays, had them mounted and bound and lettered. Little sys- 

 tematic use has been made of them, but now it is proposed to 

 calendar them, and to print these calendars, as the Lee, Weedon 

 and Greene papers of this Society have been printed by the Society, 

 so that students may know what they contain, and be able to refer 

 to them directly or through the very competent staff of the Library of 

 this Society. To their aid is due the examination of them for 

 traces of the " Bagatelles," written by Franklin and printed on his 

 press at Passy, and I submit these rough notes as showing the 

 variety, extent and importance of this collection. William Temple 

 Franklin printed in the fifth volume of his grandfather's works 

 (second edition, London: Colburn, 1819), in the second volume 

 of the Posthumous and Other Writings, under the head of " Baga- 

 telles " (Sec. 3, pp. 216 to 298), the following headnote : "The 

 letters, essays, etc., contained in this section were chiefly written 

 by Dr. Franklin for the amusement of his intimate society in Lon- 

 don and Paris, and were by himself actually collected in a small 

 portfolio, endorsed as above. Several of the pieces were either 

 originally written in French, or afterwards translated by him into 

 that language by way of exercise." Then follow : 



