Dr. Franklin's father had seventeen children. He was the fifteenth. He says in his autobiography, that his father died at the age of eighty-nine, and his mother at the age of eighty-five, and that neither were ever known to have any sickness except that of which they died.
FOOTNOTES:
[H] Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1850, by Stringer & Townsend, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New-York.
From Fraser's Magazine.
LIFE AT A WATERING PLACE.
THE DOG OF ALCIBIADES.
BY C. ASTOR BRISTED.
We left Tom Edwards mysteriously swallowed up, like a stage ghost down a trap-door. And do you know, reader, I am very near leaving him so for good and all, and suspending these sketches indefinitely,—yea, even to the time of the Mississippi dividends, or any other period beyond the Greek Calends that your imagination can conjure up. For the wise men—and the wise women, too—of Gotham are wroth with me, and one says that I am writing on purpose to libel this man or puff that woman, and another charges me with sketching my own life in Fraser, for self-glorification, and a third holds up the last number of Pendennis at me and says, "If you could write like that, there would be some excuse for you, but you won't as long as you live." "Alas, no!" said I, and was just going to burn my unfinished papers, and vow that I would never again turn aside from my old craft of reviewing. But then came reflection in the shape of a bottle of true Dutch courage—genuine Knickerbocker Madeira—and said, "Why should you be responsible for resemblances you never meant, if people will insist on finding them? Consider how prone readers, and still more hearers who take their reading at second-hand, are to suppose that the author, be he great or small, must have represented himself in some one of his personages." True enough, Mr. Bottle; for instance, any one of our fashionables will tell you that "our spirituel and accomplished friend" (as Slingsby calls him), M. Le Vicomte Vincent Le Roi, is the hero of his thrilling romance, Le Chevalier Bazalion—why they should, or what possible resemblance they can find between the real man in New-York, and the ideal one in the novel, it passeth my poor understanding to discover. Bazalion is a stalwart six-footer, who goes about knocking people's brains out, scaling inaccessible precipices, defending castles single-handed against a regiment or two, and, by way of relaxation after this hard work, victimizing all the fair dames and blooming damsels that come in his way—breaking the hearts of all the women when he has broken the heads of all the men. Le Roi is a nice gentlemanly man, of the ordinary size, who sings prettily and talks well, and makes himself generally agreeable, and not at all dangerous in society—much the more Christian and laudable occupation, it seems to me. If ever he does bore you, it is with his long stories, not with a long pike as Bazalion used to do. Be the absurdity, then, on the head of him who makes it; Qui vult decipi decipiatur: if any one chooses to think that I am bodied forth under the character of Harry Benson, and am, in consequence, a handsome young man, who can do a little of every thing instead of——but never mind what; your actor has not yet sufficient standing to come down before the footlights, and have his little bit of private chaff with the audience. Only this will I say, so help me N. P. Willis, I mean to go on with these sketches till they are finished, provided always that Fraser will take them so long and that you continue to read them, or fall into a sweet and soothing slumber over them, as the case may be. For if we are all to shut up shop until we can write as well as Mr. Titmarsh, there will be too extensive a bankruptcy of literary establishments.