Sublime

Arrivé sans le sou à Philadelphie à l’âge de dix-sept ans, il a fait fortune dans l’imprimerie ; il a su divertir le bon peuple de Pennsylvanie par ses petits essais cocasses et édifiants, il a su faire les délices, à Versailles, de la cour de Louis XVI ; il a démontré la nature électrique de la foudre et inventé le paratonnerre ; il a contribué à

1748, he began an obsessive focus on the theory behind electricity, a little-understood phenomenon that Franklin had first encountered a year earlier during a demonstration in Boston.

Franklin includes virtues which are new to our consideration such as cleanliness, silence and industry; he clearly considers the drive to acquire itself a part of virtue, whereas for most ancient Greeks this is the vice of pleonexia; he treats some virtues which earlier ages had considered minor as major; but he also redefines some familiar