of
Massachusetts for the removal of Hutchinson and Oliver.

[Sidenote: 1772--Wedderburn's attack on Franklin]

Wedderburn assailed Franklin in a speech whose ability was only
surpassed by its ferocity. In the presence of an illustrious audience,
that numbered among its members some of the most famous men of that
time or of any time, Wedderburn directed against Franklin a fluency of
invective, a fury of reproach that was almost splendid in its unbridled
savagery. The Privy Councillors, with one exception, rocked with
laughter and revelled in applause as the Solicitor-General pilloried
the agent from the colony of Massachusetts Bay as a thief, well-nigh a
murderer, a man lost to all honor, all decency. The one grave
exception to the grinning faces of the Privy Councillors was the face
of Lord North. He sat fixed in rigidity, too well aware of all that
depended upon the glittering slanders of Wedderburn to find any matter
of mirth in them. Only one other man in all that assembly of genius
and rank and fame and wit carried a countenance as composed as that of
Lord North, and that was the face of the man whom Wedderburn was
bespattering with his ready venom. Benjamin Franklin, dressed in a
gala suit, unlike the sober habit that was familiar with him, stood at
the bar of the House and listened with an unconquerable calm to all
that Wedderburn had to say. If it was the hour of Wedderburn's
triumph, it was not the hour of Franklin's humiliation. He held his
head high and suffered no emotion to betray itself while Wedderburn
piled insult upon insult, {157} and the majority of his hearers reeled
in a rapture of approval. But if Franklin listened with an unmoved
countenance, the words of Wedderburn were not without their effect upon
him. He was human and the slanders stung him, but we may well believe
that they stung him most as the representative of the fair and
flourishing colony whose petition was treated with the same insolence
that exhausted itself in attacking his honor and his name.

The clothes philosophy of Diogenes Teufelsdroch is readily annotated by
history. There are garments that have earned an immortality of fame.
Such an one is the sky-blue coat which Robespierre wore at the height
of his power when he celebrated the festival of the Supreme Being, and
in the depths of his degradation when a few days later he was carried
to his death. Such an one is the gala coat of flowered Manchester
velvet which Fr