Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[65] His famous saying “Honesty is the best policy” suggests very fairly the range of his power as a moralist, and the secret of his success as a man.

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The Portfolio

Franklin was born in Boston, but his distinctive flavor belonged to a city where the literary touch was earlier recognized. A certain proof of the cultivated character of Philadelphia, beyond New York or Boston, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, may be found in the remarkable magazine called The Portfolio, a weekly quarto which may fairly be described as the first essentially literary periodical in America. Joseph Denny, the editor, was a Bostonian and a Harvard graduate, and had edited newspapers in New England. He had been nominated for Congress and defeated in New Hampshire, and went to Philadelphia in 1799, as private secretary to Thomas Pickering, Secretary of State. The Portfolio was established at the beginning of 1801; was for five years a quarto and then for many years an octavo, following precisely the development which periodicals now sustain, substituting octavo for quarto, monthly for weekly, introducing illustrations and sometimes