Music of Philadelphia and actress. Benjamin Franklin was also a musician, a guitar teacher and inventor of musical instruments like the glass armonica. In 1784 Andrew Adgate organized the Institution for the Encouragement of Church Music, renamed the Uranian Academy (1787–1800). The school was the center of the city's choral music scene during the latter part of the 18th century. The earliest known performance of a musical drama in Philadelphia was Colley Cibber’s "Flora, or Hob in the Well", a ballad opera performed by a touring opera company from England in 1754. In 1757 Francis Hopkinson mounted an elaborate production of Thomas Arne’s
18th century in literature Human Reason: Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan". This was the first English translation directly from the Arabic original. Samuel Johnson was born on 18 September 1709 in Lichfield, Staffordshire, England. Horace Walpole was born on 24 September 1717. Daniel Defoe was another political pamphleteer turned novelist like Jonathan Swift and was publishing in the early 18th century. In 1719, he published "Robinson Crusoe". Alexander Smith was a biographer who authored "A Complete History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious Highwaymen" (1719) which includes heavily fictionalised accounts of English criminals from the medieval period to