Benjamin Franklin did a great many notable things for his country, and made her young name to be honored in many lands as the mother of such a son. It is not the idea of this memoir to ignore that or cover it up. No; the simple idea of it is to snub those pretentious maxims of his, which he worked up with a great show of originality out of truisms that had become wearisome platitudes as early as the dispersion from Babel.

"The Late Benjamin Franklin", The Galaxy, Vol. 10, No. 1, July 1870 Anthologized in Mark Twain's Sketches, New and Old (1875).

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