166 ROSENGARTEN—“ FRANKLIN PAPERS,” [April 8, 
mit, and when that is completed, it is hoped that it will be printed 
as a useful guide to the miscellaneous matter collected here. 
Sparks and Haleand Ford and Parton and Fisher and others who have 
written about Franklin have used them, but even the most indus- 
trious student may well be appalled at the labor required to master 
all the contents of these bulky volumes, representing Franklin’s 
long and many-sided activity. 
He kept copies of most of his own letters and the originals 
addressed to him, often endorsing on them the heads of his replies. 
These volumes contain papers from 1735 to 790—the first forty- 
four volumes letters to him; the forty-fifth, copies of his own let- 
ters; the forty-sixth, his correspondence with his wife ; the forty- 
seventh and forty-eighth, his own letters from 1710 to 1791; the 
forty-ninth, his scientific and political papers; the fiftieth, his 
other writings—notably his Bagatelles, those short essays which 
had such a vogue and are still read; the fifty-first, poetry and 
verse, his own and that of others, no doubt selected by him for use 
in his publications ; the fifty-second, the Georgia papers—he was 
agent for that colony; and the remaining twenty volumes, all the 
multifarious correspondence, other than official, mostly during his 
long stay in France, his various public offices at home and abroad, 
his enormous correspondence about appointments from men of all 
nationalities, who wanted to come to America, under his patronage, 
to fight, to settle, to teach, to introduce their inventions, for every 
imaginable and unimaginable purpose. 
Both in England and France he kept all notices of meetings, 
such as those of the Royal Society and other scientific bodies of 
which he was a member, invitations, visiting cards, notes, business 
cards, etc., and at home he kept copies of wills, deeds, powers of 
attorney, bonds, agreements, bills, etc., and drafts, checques, 
bills of lading, public accounts, and even certified copies of Acts 
of Congress, and account books, and, in addition, Temple Frank- 
lin left eight volumes of letters to him from 1775 to 1790. 
In this mass of material his biographers have found much that 
was of value, but there remains almost untouched the interesting 
correspondence of his friends in England during the years before 
and those of the War of Independence. There are examples of his 
own clever jewx ad’ esprit in the ‘‘ Intended Speech for the Opening 
of the Parliament in 1774,’’ in which the king himself is made to 
foretell the ‘‘seven or ten ‘years’ job’’ that his ‘‘ Ministers have 
