Excerpt from The Literary Labors of Benjamin Franklin, Vol. 28: An Address Delivered Before the American Philosophical Society at the Commemoration of the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Decease of Its Illustrious Founder and First President, April 17, 1890

When the New World sent Franklin to Europe, England and Franco received him, without question, as the equal of their own greatest men. Lavoisier, Turgot and Raynal, Button, Rousseau and Condorcet were his admirers, Gibbon, Hume, and Adam Smith, Kames, Robertson, Bentham and Priestly, his friends, while to the poet Cowper praise by him atoned for all the carpings of the critics.

When he first met Voltaire, in the hall of the French Academy of Sciences, the two old men saluted affectionately, amid the tears and the applause of the spectators, and it was proclaimed through Europe that Sophocles and Solon had embraced.

His colleague, John Adams, by no means the most ardent of his admirers, said of him:

"His reputation was more universal than that of Leibnitz or Newton, Frederick the Great or Voltaire, and his character more beloved and esteemed than any or all of them. Newton had astonished, perhaps, forty or fifty men in Europe, for not more than that number, probably, at any one time had read him and understood him, and these being held in admiration in their respective countries, at the head of the philosophers, had spread among scientific people a mysterious wonder at the genius of this, perhaps the greatest man that ever lived. But his fame was confined to men of letters. The common people cared nothing about such a recluse philosopher. Leibnitz's name was still more confined. Frederick was hated by one-half Europeans much as Napoleon is. Voltaire was considered as a vain and profligate wit, and not esteemed by anybody, though admired by all who knew his works. But Franklin's fame was universal.

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